Have you noticed there’s not much happiness going around at the moment. Seems like everywhere I turn there’s a woman sobbing on her knees, or a tormented policeman trying to coax a man down from an open window, only to end up climbing the stairs himself and swan-diving into the concrete abyss. You don’t think anyone’s happy? Well may I direct your attention to the megalomaniacs making a tidy sum of off the brainwashed masses who buy their meaningless tat. How do they do it I hear you ask. Advertisements (See dictionary definition ‘scourge’).
Advertising has come a long way since the very first entrepreneur caveman started spouting about the tar pit he was offering a dip in for a mere 7 strands of hair and a jagged rock. Of course he looked like a loveable little rascal, but upon looking a little deeper and you’d find he only owned the tar pit because he killed the previous owner with a stone rose and a Gillette razor. Oh and the tar pit killed you. Gruesomely. Small print didn’t exist in those days.
Of course nowadays there are standards so no sneaky little bugger can trick you into killing yourself for a buck. People who have stepped in and told McDonalds it’s not okay to make kids fat, and BT’s Adam and Jane that they’re too boring for television. These heroes of modern society are knows as the ASA - the Advertising Standards Authority. They’re the guys who patrol the entire broadcasting network of the UK. Expect a charity to pop up for them soon.
Cigarettes for example, have been around for a while, torturing humans and making people excessively rich in the process. Fag companies used to advertise everywhere, billboards, television, radio, you name it. I’m fairly sure they went to the moon before Armstrong and set up an advert just for him (and Buzz) to see when they got there. Thankfully for humanity though they were forced to put warnings on their adverts and products. But thankfully for the cigarette firms, people are idiots and will smoke anyway. So it didn’t take too long for them to be banned from advertising entirely.
There is of course the inevitable loopholes. The ASA are self regulatory and are therefore run by the advertising industry itself. So realistically anything is allowed really. It’s a bit like having a guard dog, but instead of choosing a Doberman they’ve got themselves a Tamagotchi. I found a Rizla advert on my msn before, it’s rolling paper, not necessarily for tobacco you see, but yes based on that fact you should expect an increase in puff pastry commercials. Oh and there’s also the number one advert that makes such an impression on kids they’re puffing away before they‘ve even sat their first sex education class: smoking parents.
Television (see scourge) brought with it a massive boom in the ad-game. Now companies could beam themselves directly into your poxy little living room and invade you like the French did, leaving you feeling violated and nibbling the corner of a stale baguette. It all kicked off a bit of a revolution. Creative people in suits and ascots holding a croissant in one hand and a fountain pen in the other, set out to create 30 second long clips of charm and pure persuasion for the moneybags who couldn’t be arsed doing it themselves. Hence the rise of advertising companies.
They’d create all sorts of gems like the Cadbury gorilla, the big ad for Carlton Draught or the Xbox bang bang advert, which was banned actually. Typical, I‘m not giving to your charity now. Nike have produced some decent ones in the past, as have Coca-Cola. Remember that Snowman ad for Irn Bru? Brilliant. Or the one where Brains from Thunderbirds danced like Christopher Walken on crack. Epic. Or when Apple did that 1984 advert where that woman threw a sledgehammer into her oppressor's beaming face. Ironic. Some I never really liked were the Guinness ones, they were just tiresome, superficial and pretentious but they always got massive acclaim. “Tick follows tick follows tick follows tock” boring! The recent one with the domino effect is better.
But recently advertisements have got a bit, what’s the word? Pathetic. The creative swanks who left the country for better rewards have been replaced by retarded walruses in mustard stained t-shirts who scribble all over an A3 piece of paper with a piece of fudge brownie and hand it in to their boss who looks at the paper, tries to pretend that he isn’t drunk, and gives it the green light. Advertisers now pretty much resort to annoying the hell out of their target audience and anyone else who’s unfortunate enough to be caught in the crossfire. Because tedious annoyance is memorable.
Exhibit A: we have the Go Compare man. Yes you know him, the obese younger brother of the Pringles bloke who runs around telling upper class women they can save daddy’s money and gallivanting around a desert island telling anyone who happens to be marooned there they can save a few quid. Sorry but if I was deserted on a paradisal island I tend to think I’d make up an imaginary character like Wilson from Cast Away. Not a fat bloke in a tux running around telling me to compare! My therapist told me to stop comparing.
Exhibit B: we have the fabulous piece of creative genius that is the advert for webuyanycar.com. I feel I must genuinely apologise for bringing this up. It starts with a normal looking man behind a news desk, nothing bothersome here, but then all of a sudden from nowhere, a sneak attack of pure evil emanates from him. He stands up and starts singing a song about the unnecessary service they offer. Imagine Westlife wrote their own songs, you’re not even close. It is the most aggravating commercial on the box right now, it’s the only advert that will make me flick to the next channel. As soon as I see his obnoxious little face and his news desk I’m off. Gone. I’m on Channel 4 watching the ultimate Big Brother, and by Joe I’m not going back, not for at least 45 seconds in which I’ll probably forget what I was watching and therefore miss the last 15 minutes of Poirot. Sigh.
In short it’s not only horrendous advertising but it’s costing commercial television money. Say you own a tambourine company and you’d like to advertise your new bad-ass percussion instrument on ITV during the final episode of The Bill (because hey, the viewers will need something to entertain themselves with now). Okay, so now imagine the nice lady on the other end wants to schedule you straight after a webuyanycar advert. Are you going to do that? Hell no! The best place to be is on the very next channel, three seconds into the webuyanycar ad. This company annoys me so much I’m thinking of giving them a call and seeing how much I can get for my micro-machines. “Hello yes, a small hatchback it is, how much? Size? Erm I‘d say about one and a half centimetres.” Actually I’ve realised a flaw in my scheme already, it’s online. Crap, I bet they don’t have a micro-machine option. But I bet they do have a Jazz option! Ok here’s what we’ll do: we’ll all go on their site and offer them a big talking transformer called Jazz. If enough of us do it we should be able to shut them down forever or at least make fifty quid and cause mild discomfort at their headquarters. Why do I get the image of the Death Star when I imagine their headquarters? Weird.
You must be wondering how this kind of advertisement is actually successful? I’ll tell you how. People are idiots. Like the smoking ads of yesteryear they could write ‘Warning! Going on Go Compare will cause Aunt Bessie to come round your house and kill you with a pair of oven mitts’ and people would still go on it. If a advert during Corrie wrote ‘JUMP’ in big letters across the screen, the UK would witness an earthquake so powerful the Earth’s very core would implode and God himself would get a sun tan from the aftermath. Okay maybe a slight exaggeration, but you have God to thank that they haven’t done that during the Superbowl broadcast over in the States.
The future of television isn’t all that bleak though. We have Sky+! Or V+ if you’re on Virgin. I’m not 100% sure on what the plus means. I’m just guessing it means positive, because you can record stuff and whiz through the ad breaks! This thing seriously made me so much happier. It’s like every channel is the BBC. Happiness reigns! Now that very same woman is on her knees crying tears of joy, and that guy just jumped into the policeman’s arms and they’re going on a romantic getaway to Cyprus. This can only mean one thing. The evil bosses at Tat inc. are not happy, money’s not coming in as quickly as it used to, and rent on the inside of a volcano isn’t cheap.
So they have to find new ways of getting your attention. Putting an advert in the actual show is one way of doing it, I hear in the next Britain’s Got Talent Ant will have a Burger King billboard pasted to his forehead and Dec will just dress up as the King himself, not sure which will be more obvious. Celebrity endorsement is usually a winner for advertisers too. Depends who you get mind you. John Smith picked a winner with Peter Kay, can’t say Iceland did the same with Kerry Katona. It’s used in the political world too, remember when Oprah Winfrey told us Barrack Obama would fix the matrix? Look who’s in the White House. It’s like celebrity top trumps. Now we know that Oprah beats Chuck Norris. Mike Huckabee had Chuck Norris. Chuck friggin’ Norris and he still lost. I suppose it depends on your party though. Eddie Izzard couldn’t even get Labour to lose with dignity earlier this year.
A favourite weapon of the overlords that cant be avoided like an ad-break however is product placement. You just have to train yourself not to notice it or be mentally corrupted by it. The odd bottle of Sprite on the set of Emmerdale. Innocent enough isn’t it? Wrong! It’s pure evil! I like to think I’ve managed to be immune to this sort of thing. Okay so I watched the Premier League match at the weekend on ESPN and I might have seen an advert for ‘liking’ Manchester United on facebook, and I might have ‘liked’ them afterwards. But that’s just one time, and besides I do like United, don’t I? Oh God they’ve got to me. Before long I’ll be in Clown College.
I wouldn’t mind adverts if they weren’t so darn painful and annoying. They’re not all bad, sometimes a good one will appear from nowhere and surprise you. But we need more of them to stop this horrible oppression! Sledgehammer to Steve Jobs anyone?
No comments:
Post a Comment