Advertising

[avevale_intelligencer]

(My opinions don't change much these days, though I believe I am open to evidence that might convince me otherwise. So one could probably search back through this journal and find a post very like the one I'm about to write. Thing is, I don't want to bore people by posting the same thing too often, so I try to leave a decent interval between posts on the same subject.)

I really, really hate advertising as it is today. It's not that I don't understand the reason why people advertise. If you have something to sell, you need to tell people what you've got, where you are and possibly how much you want for it. If someone else is selling the same thing, you need to tell people that yours is better and/or cheaper (and if it isn't, why not?) I have no problem whatsoever with advertisements of the kind you used to get in newspapers, you know the ones: "Mr Egbert Spuggins, Esquire, begs to inform the General Public that a wide selection of hand-made Umbrellas and Walking Sticks may be purchased at reasonable Cost from his Emporium in St.-James'-street, at the Sign of the Red Tulip."

Simple. Does the job. If you want an Umbrella or a Walking Stick, you go and have a look. Or a Look.

But since those happy, innocent days, advertising has run amok, and nothing has been done to curb it. Advertisers now use every psychological trick in the book short of actual brainwashing to get their product into your head and keep it there. There's a regulatory body, meant to make sure that advertisements are (in the old phrase) "legal, decent, honest and truthful," but the meaning of at least three out of four of those words is liable to shift at a moment's notice and as for the last one, well, who really believes that advertising people even know what it means? "Truth in advertising" should go without saying, but it doesn't.

Advertising is all-pervasive, intrusive, often ugly (sometimes deliberately) and largely pointless. There's no need for most of it. And the ad industry knows this. It's running on quicksand: if the economy collapses, people are still going to need houses and food and clothes, but the first thing it's going to be obvious that nobody needs is advertising, and the chance of somebody realising that this is true anyway increases every day. Advertising has to keep running faster and faster, becoming more and more all-pervasive and intrusive, because if it once stops it will sink. See Frederik Pohl, passim.

And as a result of this frenetic, frantic, headlong pace, whether by accident (not enough thought put in) or, as I like to think, by design (ad writers just getting fed up) we get what I like to call the "subvert." This is an advert which works if you just let it wash over you, but if you think about it reveals another layer of meaning which is less than complimentary either to the product advertised, or to its intended customer base. A recent example is the ad for the travel agency, in which we see the people faking up the blissful seaside scene. Overt message: "We build you the perfect holiday." Subvert message: "Our holidays are not real." There are others: adverts for food which show the people eating the food as selfish/dishonest/stupid/smug, adverts for cars which show the car owner as willing to let a human being plunge to his death rather than risk their paintwork being scratched, adverts for chocolate which indicate in every way short of actually saying so that the chocolate is laced with powerful narcotics and if you eat it you will (at very least) obliviously flood your bathroom...it's been going on for years. And let's not even talk about Pot Noodle.

Subverts can be unintentionally funny, but they're just a distraction from the horror that is advertising. Yes, it funds commercial television, which is ninety per cent of television these days, and has paid for some good programmes to be made and shown that the poor old Beeb could never have managed on the licence fee alone...but I wonder, is it worth it? Bombarded with advertising at every turn, are we becoming deadened to sensory stimulation? How much worse can advertising get? (I suspect we've seen nothing yet.) Isn't there a more sensible way we could be using our resources?

I think there must be. But I can't see any way of stopping it.

Comments

[aunty_marion]

Agreed about the 'subverts'. The ones I hated (which now, thank goodness, seem to have been stopped - maybe someone saw sense?) were the ones the Post Office, of all places, were running, with the rather inept 'staff' failing utterly to put up posters about their products. Apparent message: "Look! We've got all this terribly useful stuff you can access at your post office!" Sub-message: "Look, would *you* trust your money to a gang of plonkers who can't even put up a poster?"

I try and avoid advertising as much as possible; unfortunately, it's not possible to avoid all of it.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

The "fun" thing about those was that (some of them) were actually filmed in a post office that had recently been shut, giving rise to a certain amount of ill feeling in the local community.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

oh, good Lord.

And yes, I definitely see where you're coming from with the whole subverts thing (though I believe the coinage "subvertising" has already been used to indicate ads that have been tweaked to satirize the original intent). And something rotten in the state of advertising in general.

Kind of weird though: outside the UK videos on the BBC News website are "sponsored" by an ad preceding it. Yesterday it was PBS trailing its flagship shows. ?

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I like the slogan on Ritter Sport (the German ones, I don't know what the ones in English have): "Quadratisch. Praktisch. Gut." Can you imagine any UK or US advertiser daring to have a slogan which just says (perfectly truthfully and informatively) "practical, square, good"? The first two are provable, the third is opinion (but since it is not comparative it's an opinion which most people would say is reasonable).

What happened to the adverts which were amusing in their own right, like the Heineken ones? Oh yes, they were forced off because of the "truth in advertising" clause, even though a parrot coming back to life was obvious hyperbole, whereas the boring "in 9 out of 10 tests" ones squeak through because their tests do actually indicate that (never mind that the 10 people they asked were all employees).

I do rather hope that your prediction about it collapsing does happen. I'd hate to be in anything more like the Pohl world than we already are...

[jahura.livejournal.com]

Most of the advertising out here tends to be one of four categories: cars, pharma, fast food, and cell phones. Either regulation or cost prevents most others from bothering. Typically, the car ads are monotonous (and therefore can be easily spaced over) and the cell ads are disgusting (appealing to pre-teens who must have a phone to be hip) but the ones that really irk me are the pharma ads. Stressed-out hypochondriacs are the target, and that's how the pharma companies make their billions. That's bad enough in itself, but when I hear voice-overs like "I knew rheumatoid arthritis was panful but I didn't know it would affect my joints" or see the new "miracle pill" for psoriasis I just want to throw a brick at the TV.

Okay, rant done.