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Non-Fiction
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| Buy this shit | |
| By dotcommie | ||||||||
| 26 October 2006 | ||||||||
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Modern toss “Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it” Stephen Leacock Is their anything I can buy that doesn’t have a trite description of how it’ll change my life? Nobody sells a product anymore. No, now everything is billed as a solution. I can see the sly logic in this. Surely, these overpaid, London based media tossers think. Surely if we call it a solution, then no matter what it is, the consumer will fall in and acknowledge that ‘yes I have a problem! And only this glow-in-the-dark plastic dashboard Jesus can solve it. Hurrah for Megacorp!’. This is how stupid they think we are. Really look at an ad next time you watch it. The car advert, with its haunting acoustic melody strummed by some supposedly ‘indie’ band. This contemplative tune will be accompanied by some random footage, which only shows the product in glimpses. This is the pinnacle of subtlety for advertisers. Now at the bottom of the pile are the daytime, pay TV adverts. Especially the finance ads. Are you broke? Are the loan sharks threatening to kill your family? Are you sitting in a bath of warm water with the razors at the ready? Wait! We’ll take on your debt, buy it from your creditors cheap, and give you easy monthly installments till you die. So I’m parodying, but Christ they almost parody themselves. The likes of Ocean Finance, who’s advertising ‘stars’ where so poor that Viz kept a four month running gag going on about their ugliness. Those awful ambulance chasing injury solicitors. They’ve usually got some ‘true-life’ style report about June, 52 who fell off of a poorly built chair, her voice over accompanying a dramatic reconstruction of her………falling off a chair. “And I received a hundred percent of my compensation” crows June. So the ambulance chasers got costs, you got your cash and the rest of us suffer higher business insurance premiums, not to mention the indignity of those us who have to be trained how to sit on a chair so the employer can cover his own back. All the advantages of a litigious society, eh? And of course the pseudo-scientific advert. This one has many guises, but companies selling wrinkle creams, health drinks or health foods are the usual culprits. They assume your basic level of science to be that of an 11 year-olds. ‘Did you know that there are friendly bacteria?’ Yes I learned that in school, thanks. Only we didn’t call them friendly, just useful. You’re giving human traits to a mindless sub-life so that I’ll like your brand of semen-like yoghurt type drink ‘We’ve developed a unique culture called El Cassi Immunitas!’ Oh how clever of you to slip in a word that sounds a bit like Immune. That’s convinced me of your products indispensability. Perhaps the most insulting example is from Robinsons. Their Ribena toothkind adverts show a white coated old guy wittering about in front of diagrams, before a mum walks in and states “ I’m a mum and I don’t know about all that, but the kids just love it”. So presumably pregnancy gives you a lobotomy and means that even simple science is beyond the grasp of mums. And then of course their claims turn out to be so much statistic massaging bullshit. Benecol claimed their range of dairy products produced significant reductions in cholesterol. They even roped in Carol Vordeman (for those who don’t know, Vordeman is considered by us the British public to be the last word on matters scientific. She is an attractive egghead) to flog their snake-oil, before scandal forced them to admit that the ‘significant’ reduction was actually more of a negligible reduction. So you end up feeling like an idiot in a nationwide village square buying magic beans of some multi-national quack. Bah. But it’s not just the adverts. The packaging sometimes beggars belief. There are companies selling ice in bags, and on the back of these bags of ice, they give instructions for use. Jesus wept. Marks and bastard Spencers. This is not just an advert, it’s an adjective packed, sultry toned sex-line of an advert HSBC, the world’s local bank. Based in Hong Kong McDonalds proclaim “I’m loving it” however the face of the poor underpaid sod mopping up puke at my local Mcdee’s tells a different story. They should be banned, or at least only accessed by choice. Don’t even get me started about adverts directed children, who lack the required defensive cynicism to see through these gaudy pocket gouging short films. For every artistic advert or extremely funny product drive there are literally thousands of suicide inducing hawkers flogging shit no one wants or needs. Even billboards and posters seem like another pollutant. Yes adverts, particularly posters, have produced some classic pop-art, but in the majority they have been at best banal at worst downright offensive. What if, just for one day, you walked through a zone completely free of adverts? Managed for a day to completely avoid any sales attempts, subtle or gross? I’ll never know how that feels, and it’s unlikely that you will. Even in a wilderness you’d bend to lace up your Reebok trainers or pull on a Nike jacket. Should you stumble across some primitive tribe, you can bet they’ll have been visited by coca-cola and probably a cigarette brand too. Before I choke on my own bilious rage I’ll leave you with a thought from George Orwell “Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket”
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