Advertising

Advertising at its best is informative but at its worst it’s annoying and invasive. The trouble is it’s mainly the latter and there’s no way of getting away from it because it’s everywhere; TV, magazines, the internet, the roadside and even your own home when leaflets get pushed through the front door. Truly, to escape advertising you need to abandon technology, move to the remotest place known to man and never again purchase a packaged product.

Magazines, realistically, have had their day. With the exponential growth of the internet the sun is setting on their monopoly, so to keep revenue up they seem to ram as many adverts as possible into each edition. At first glance these magazine might look good value for money but you’ll spend half your time flicking past pages of ads for shampoo and cut price camping gear. For some reason they also insist on inserting a million leaflets of varying sizes so that when you pick the thing up they all fall on the floor. It’s not in the least bit annoying.

Even the BBC, which is free from commercial advertising due to being funded by a tax, still jumps in on the act. Instead of taking money to advertise other people’s products, they spend the time advertising their own. It’s still better than the alternative though, which is why I won’t listen to any non-BBC radio station. I don’t want to hear the same Carphone Warehouse advert sixty times on my way to work, or have some annoying jingle stuck in my head all day because a certain advert was playing as I parked my car. Call me crazy but I’d like a radio station to play music… which they mostly don’t, so I listen to CDs instead.

Satellite TV is no better either and the bastard channels conspire with one another. There are about a billion music channels so what would you think the odds are of them having conflicting advert time slots? You’re watching one music channel when it breaks for adverts (you know, all those absurd ringtones for sale) so you change to the next music channel. Which is also on an ad break. And the next one. And so on. They also alter the volume levels so that when the adverts come on they’re about three times as loud as the programme you were watching so your gran’s hearing aid explodes and the dog shits herself.

With the advent of technology you should do what I do, which is never watch anything ‘live’. You simply record it and start watching your programme ten minutes late. That way when the advert break kicks in, you can simply fast forward it. By the end of the programme you’ve pretty much caught up and haven’t wasted the time being subjected to that singing twat in the Go Compare commercials. It also stops the mood being ruined when some TV company genius decides to drop an ad break straight in the middle of the pivotal emotional scene (because nothing says “I’ll help you battle your debilitating illness” better than switching to an advert for garden peas).

At least with the above example you don’t actually miss any content (you’re just left with a deflated atmosphere which the director spent months perfecting and an hour of the film building up to). Watch motor racing and you’ll curse when it goes to a commercial break halfway through the race and then curse some more when it returns and you discover the guy who was leading is sixth, the guy who was second has crashed and the new leader appeared from fourth to capitalise on the confusion. But at least you’ll have learned that The Sun has an exclusive interview with a celebrity (you’ve never heard of) about her marriage break-up (which you don’t care about).

Anyone who’s used the internet will be familiar with pop-up advertising which, helpfully, opens a hundred new windows about Viagra and sex with college students when you click on a link about a kitten stuck in a tree. Thankfully enough people saw a niche in developing software to block it all, but it still persists.

Surely it’s the people who accost you in the street who are among the worst though. These are the people who you deliberately go out of your way to avoid making eye contact with and yet they still thrust a leaflet under your nose, advertising something to revolutionise your life (cut price carpet cleaning services! How did you survive before?). The correct response is to say, “If you want them put in the bin, do it yourself”.

Advertising has its place but its place is not right under my nose. I’m a big film fan, so I like to see all the trailers and artwork for movies before they’re released. I’m aware that many people aren’t though so I wouldn’t want them splashed across every medium going (even I got to the point of violence about how many times I was subjected to the bloody Avatar trailer). What’s the answer? Well, in this case I know where to go, specifically, on the internet and I watch all my trailers there. Problem solved. Granted, I don’t imagine there are many avid fans of toilet cleaners who will sit, with baited breath, waiting for a new, improved formula. But on the other hand, as much as I like my toilets clean, I really don’t care.

If you’re going to subject me to commercials for a product I’ve never heard of (and don’t care about) at least make it entertaining. After all, that’s why people watch TV; to be entertained. I actually don’t watch much, but one of the greatest (and simplest) adverts ever was a John West tuna one where a bloke has a fight with a bear, which clobbers him with a roundhouse kick before getting kicked in the nuts. It’s entertaining because it’s funny and it’s funny because it looks real. And I don’t even like tuna, but I remembered it so it’s successful. If I was ever tempted to give the fish another chance, John West is the brand I’d head for. At the other end of the scale I doubt I’ll ever forget the aforementioned Go Compare brand but I’d chop my arm off before I used any of their bloody products, out of general principal.

John West: Genius.