Review: Advertising
Recent adverts have urged me to have something called “a semi-religious experience” at the Burning Man festival, to “live my myth” in Greece by allowing a cherub to blow at my face, and to come back to BT after briefly abandoning it for a fictional telephone service provider. All these experiences, which would perhaps have been fun or enlightening, are now tainted with meaninglessness.Not content with dominating the world of consumer goods, advertising is gradually sucking everything into its gaping craw. There’s nothing, from AIDS to ziggurats, that can’t be used to sell the public a new car or innovative sanitary towel. And we suck it up greedily. “Ooh, I never knew I needed an iPod, because I never use a walkman or buy music, but now I’ve got one anyway. Sometimes I imagine myself in silhouette, dancing.”
Advertising and its evil sister, marketing, are the reason that going to the supermarket now feels like taking part in a boring game show rather than buying some food.
But I can’t help but feel a glimmer of respect for advertising, as its vast, slogan-bestrewn jackboot stamps repeatedly on my face. I often find myself staring, hypnotized, at the TV as a series of actors with Botox-severe faces wave products at me. At the cinema, overwhelmed by the sheer size of the ads, I’ve been known to grab the arm of the person sitting next to me and swear, with tears of rapture in my eyes, “I’ll buy it – whatever it is”, only to find that it’s an advert for something impossible like a credit card or flying business class.
Advertising: Sometimes depressing, but probably an inevitable by-product of civilization. 4 out of 10.
posted by Eskimo @ 2:18 pm
12 Comments:
wel yeah. but i mean u have to admit ipods are prety cool!
I am a slave to marketing. It works on my feeble brain in so many ways. I don't understand it... I'm intelligent, I have an advertising background so I KNOW how this shit works... why do I still feel compelled to buy things like the "Eggstractor" the "Safety Can" the "Chef's Wizard" etc?
Idiocy is my first guess...
You buy the eggstractor because of its clever name. What does it eggstract from the eggs?
is it a tractor made out of eggs?
Rob, it extracts the shell. You put the egg in, push on it real hard, and it squirts the egg out the bottom, peeled.
Behold: http://www.eggstractor.com/Egg.asp
Fuckin wow.
I dunno about that (said as I am now looking at careers in this area; you can hear my self-respect being kicked down the stairs by my ambition, it sounds a bit like someone selling out).
Now to totally contradict myself, if something loses its' meaning by being used to sell something, does it have all that much meaning to begin with?
On a tangent, what's going on in the flying mermaid soaring over Turkey ad?
space rant teh point is that turkys cant flyu so tharefoare by proces of alimination mermads can.
killer fact!
Well, useful fact.
Supermarkets arrange food so it get more expensive as you go from left to right, because that's how we look at things (I saw this on TV).
BUT, if you know about it, it's easy to find the cheap food, thereby subverting their evil schemes.
I am a typesetter, which means I need to constantly "liaise" with a marketing department, and I loathe them with every font in my suitcase. "Evil" doesn't even come close, Eskimo.
I'vw noticed that there are a lot of authors whose surname starts with 'S'. I reckon it's cause you're getting a bit bored by the time you get to the 'S' shelf and so are more likely to choose one. Go & have a look if you don't believe me. Also it's easy to find the cheap food by looking at the price tag surely? Have I been doing it wrong? No fucker tells me ANYTHING!
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