Advertising isn’t an industry famed for its honesty. We’ve all pretty much grown to accept that. We know that most washing powders make your laundry pretty much the same shade of grey after a while, that no amount of foul-smelling spray will cause women to stampede towards you ripping their clothes off, and that shampooing your hair is, in a lot of ways, completely non-sensual.
None of this really bothers us anymore. We just accept it as the rules of the game. But the trouble is advertisers have taken this as permission to go even further. It’s time to draw a line in the sand. It’s time to say:
Buying your product isn’t literally revolutionary.
In 1962 protest singer Malvina Reynolds wrote “Little Boxes”. It was a delightful little song with a lovely nursery-rhymish tune that was also a political satire mocking the conformity of middle-class suburbs.
Then O2 took that song, and put it in this advert:
Not content with simply taking a dead protest singers work and using it to sell phone contracts however, they “rewrote the lyrics for the last part of the song, to refer to the positivity and possibilities that we can create through changing things”.
Excuse me I just had to go and rinse my eyes out after they actually started bleeding with rage.
This has become especially problematic with the rise of Facebook and Twitter, with companies pushing to get you to “Friend” them, or even worse, become a “Follower”. We just want to pay you money for goods and services! Can’t we do that with joining your revolutionary cell or brainwashing cult.
You are not one of us.
At first glance this advert could easily be a twin to O2’s “Little Boxes” travesty until… Oh no! See! They were joking! Tesco isn’t really all stuck up like those other phone companies. It’s cool. It’s just an ordinary guy, like you and me!
Barclay’s have done a similar campaign, getting that bloke who was in the Office and Pirates of the Caribbean to give a no-nonsense sounding voice over that’s mocking the weird metaphors the ad people are using to explain why Barclay’s banking is so great.
Barclay’s, incidentally, is the same bank that took the popular habit of calling cash machines a “hole in the wall” and actually started labeling all their cash machines “hole in the wall”. Because they’re no nonsense, see? Like us! Of course, then they trademarked the phrase “hole in the wall” because it’s not enough to just use our sayings, they want to actually own them.
The worst offender though has to be the cartons of Innocent smoothies, which are so self-consciously friendly and quirky they make you want to kill puppies.
Adverts are there to sell products, they aren’t products in themselves.
Like most of the truly terrible things in the world, this trend can be traced back to Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Once there was a purer, more innocent time when we actually thought Star Wars: The Phantom Menace would be a good thing. In fact, we were really excited about it. For those old enough to remember the release of the original trilogy this was a chance to relive one of the formative experiences of their youth, for those of us who weren’t there, this was to be our moon landing, the defining experience of our generation.
The Internet as we know it was in its infancy, but every scrap of information about that film was pawed over and passed around like a lingerie catalogue in a boarding school. So when, on November 17th, 1998, the first trailer for the movie was placed in front of Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, people bought tickets just for the chance to get a glimpse of the first new Star Wars film in a generation.
That was where the sickness started, but it didn’t properly mutate into its current form until the run-up to Cloverfield, a film that didn’t even have a title when it was first announced. Perfecting techniques first used by The Blair Witch Project and Speilberg’s A.I., any information about Cloverfield was actively hidden around the Internet, with people comparing clues and swapping theories to track down the next hint. People were now actively working to see an advert.
Today, with social media the way it is, each of us is a now a tiny, unpaid ad executive, helping to ensure that the latest trailers or even mildly amusing yogurt adverts are spread far and wide.
But that’s not all. There’s a further twist of the knife.
Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s long awaited return to the Alien Franchise, is a film we’re all very keen to see. And it’s being advertised the heck out of. There are trailers, movie clips, viral videos, the lot, and they get passed around keenly by people who won’t earn a penny from the film’s box office.
It’s gotten to the point where we’re so keen to see what is basically an advert for a film that Youtube can get us to sit through other adverts just to see the advert we want. But I didn’t realize how far down the rabbit hole we were until last week, when, to see the latest Prometheus trailer I first had to sit through an advert… that was also for Prometheus.
Once we get to that point, we really ought to just pack up civilization and head back into the oceans.
About the author: Chris Farnell is a freelance writer who covers marketing and jobs advertising. 9 out of 10 cats prefer him.
Credits: Image courtesy of Dan Century.