All advertising is, by nature, overly optimistic. Every product and service so promoted is buffed up and presented as the perfect solution to your needs and desires. Most of these are usually fit for purpose but rarely, if ever, quite as good as the advert might have had you thinking. Some advertising stretches the truth and the rest is downright lies. More pointedly it cannot be escaped. For as long as there has been manufacturing there has been the attendant advertising industry giving the sales chaps a helpful head start. Bill boards, newspapers, magazines, flyers, neon lights, television. Most of these are not particularly intrusive. If they are, then we have devised ways of managing the effects. Should anyone be sufficiently desperate to want to view the commercial channels (cycling on ITV4, for instance) it is known that three or four times an hour there will be an ad break. That is the time to put the kettle on, relieve the call of nature, kill the sound, put the cat out, discuss how it managed to spontaneously combust… Roadside bill boards are unattractive but are easily ignored – they have to be on the grounds of road safety. Every newspaper and glossy magazine is full of adverts. They don’t move, pop and fizz, play irritating jingles or anything else. Unless something specifically catches the eye they are easily disregarded.
Not online! Do an internet search and all the headline results will be ads. There is a little symbol denoting this, but click (even by mistake) and that’s another payment to Google. Having found your webpage suddenly, and without warning, a popup ad has you looking at a half-naked woman telling you that her self-confidence has skyrocketed. She can now leak and dribble without anyone ever knowing! It is moving pictures, music, jingles, voices, things that go bang and pop. Can they pipe in smell yet? It won’t be far away. They appeal to every sense. And it is all obtrusive. You will not escape. Lloyds Bank – By Your Side Since… Yeah, right. It wasn’t so long ago that there was a branch in every town. Now they have all been closed down in a money-saving exercise without giving a monkey’s for the convenience of the customer. By Your Side – with our hand in your wallet. Relieving you of your hard-earned dosh in the form of obscene charges and interest rates. ‘Oh, we have told you about them. We occasionally include a small leaflet with the statements we send out at ever more infrequent intervals. They are very dense in content and style and you probably have better things to do than actually read it. So we’ll just help ourselves and if you run out of money, well we can always offer you a loan at an exorbitant rate to help you through’. By Your Side…
HSBC – Part of Something Bigger. So big and so powerful that we are actually unaccountable to anyone. We might irk a government here and a regulator there and be fined a bit of pocket money from time to time, but they need us and we know that. We can do what we like as long as we keep our shareholders happy.
RBS – Nationalised Risk, Privatised Profits. They are not using this tag line at the moment. But they could.
Carlsberg – Probably the Best Beer in the World. Er, no! It is a mass-produced lager that tastes much the same as every other mass-produced lager. Clever marketing, but isn’t it an insult to all those artisan brewers and micro-breweries who actually do come up with drinks that are far superior in quality and flavour. And those poor Trappist monks who would love to shout from the rooftops about their wonderful abbey beers. Oh sorry. Shhh…
Is Strongbow refreshing? Sure, but a huge advertising budget stops the punters thinking about other brands.
Over Fifties Funeral Plan. From as little as £2 per month (but probably a lot more). Yet they offer you a free £100 voucher to spend as you wish. That surely indicates the profits they hope to make out of you. By the way, if you die within two years, you get nothing. Then if you die soon after it might be worth it. But live too long and you’ll get back less than you paid in. Why don’t you just open a savings account? With the globally unaccountable bank that’s not by your side? I see your problem! Shove a fiver a month under the bed! Actually, you’ll be dead and you won’t care. The money will go to the funeral directors and all they do is burn the body in the furnace. They do it all with panache, a bit of pomp and ceremony, and some false grieving, safe in the knowledge that the distraught relatives are otherwise distracted.
Gambling. Oh the adverts are full of joy and excitement. Huge cheques being handed out left, right and centre. It’s for charity. It could be you. Do the Postcode lottery – just £10 per week. What? You can feed a family of four for a tenner a day. And yet kids are going without in the unlikelihood that irresponsible parents will win a large sum that they won’t know what to do with anyway. It’ll be squandered and the situation will be worse than it was beforehand. But that’s not in the advert. They just want to get you hooked. Have a free bet. £250 if Muppethead scores first. Do it for the homeless dogs. Let’s beat cancer together – but first we’ll pay the chief executive and his team and for their plush offices. Salaries and advertising campaigns all need funding and then, if there’s anything left, we’ll think about beating cancer! But we’ll tug at every heartstring we can find.
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