THEY CAPTURE OUR SOULS WITH A SMILE

 

There are TV commercials I like and those that I don’t.

Ads can be good. They can promote good ideas which bring benefit.

At their basic, they are providing information.

But the ads also get their claws into you  the moment you buy anything on the internet, clocking your purchase and then every time you switch on, interrupting you to entice you with more stuff.

They bend our will; try to coerce us into buying something we may not need. And then sell it to us with a smile.

Advertising - tall stories sold with a smile

Take the cure-all pills for indigestion, for example –swallowed and hey presto, big smile, off you go clubbing, or to meetings, ailments cleared up. Er, not always, and certainly not as fast as that.

Mostly I try to avoid the commercial breaks.

Especially on ITV4 during their cycling programs.

I record these to watch later, when I can fast forward through their very long tedious commercials, so long I forget what I was watching.

There is an interesting trend these days in that the content of the ad you are watching, the story they have concocted to grab your attention, has nothing to do with what they are selling.

The scene being played out is simply to hook you until the name of the product is thrust upon you.

Advertising, especially ads promoting life style are re shaping our behaviour, even our posture.

Great example of this is the mobile phone, by turn a brilliant and evil device. 

We are evolving into a species which walks head bent staring at the thing resting in the palm of our hand.

I once observed a woman with two children in tow, all in single file, all of them heads bowed in thrall to the small screen, unaware that they were about to step under a bus.

Holding conversations with a remote voice as we walk not looking we are going.  Unaware of our surroundings; in .dream land, absent from the world, no longer in the present.

There is a side benefit from this trend. It means you can talk aloud to yourself on the street without raising passer-by’s eyebrows. Unless they, too, are on their pesky phone!

One ad I hated to begin but which now amuses me is the one with the fat opera singer guy belting out “Go Compare”.

I presume this is a website offering to find you competitive prices for goods and services.

The story line has developed over time, which is another way of hooking you.

Betting ads. I hate them. Tempting people to get into debt. How can that be allowed.

 As for the Peloton promotion these ads may be a sign that cycle sport is now accepted as a main stream activity.  So, good in a way.

 I first noticed them during the pandemic, showing how you can train and get fit at home.  Of course, you will need to spend a small fortune on the bike/computer screen kit. 

The ads annoy the hell of out me.

Probably because they are aimed at the well-heeled.

The pedalling scene appears to be set  a large swell apartment, perhaps a converted warehouse costing a £million, and the peddlers are all smiling.

Everyone in every ad is smiling, grinning from ear to ear.

Smiling is nice; you do so in reaction to seeing or hearing something. But we don’t go around with fixed smiles as we carry our day to day tasks. But they do in ads.

Woe betide you do not smile in an ad! All the ads are full of annoying beaming people, one ad after another. I’m all for a good smile, but one after another; it’s just too much when there is nothing, absolutely nothing to smile about in this world! Well, there is cycle sport on the tele, the Tour, the Olympics. These events make me smile. But that’s fantasy land compared to fall out over Brexit, the pandemic scaring us shitless, climate chaos kicking in, con merchants like Johnson running governments.

I imagine that the ad world is following government dictate – to put a smile on people’s faces and distract them from what’s going on in the real world  

So, back to the ads: In ad world a smile registers as positive – sells the product, even in impossible situations.

Such as in the Peloton ads where they are all grinning while busting a gut riding along on their state of the art stationary trainer linked to computer and or zoom, urged on by a coach!

Like they are out for a stroll on the prom instead of the more likely tense expression when pumping iron with lactic acid burning the hell out of legs, heart thumping, and sweat running – put a towel over the handlebars! And they are always smiling!

What are they on?

Then the coach on the screen - she’s grinning like a maniac too - calls out. “There you are. All done and dusted.”

In one of these takes someone will collapse and when they do, they should show it.

I hope that when people buy into this scene they are given good advice on how to build up the miles / hours, slowly and regularly. Because on home trainers it is so easy to overdo it. Gone are the natural restraints met in the real world – hills, wind, road surface, and the view from the saddle- all of which can act to temper athletic aggression more easily than when on a stationary trainer.

This is especially important for those who have led a sedentary lifestyle.  To suddenly go from that to training very hard could do them a mischief.

In my day I learned you needed 1500 to 2000 miles of steady riding before the season started and you got down to serious race training!

You can tell a fit athlete by the prominent veins, a condition known as vascularity, when the surrounding skin looks thin, enhancing visual appeal and this is partially due to low levels of subcutaneous fat which helps achieve defined veins and muscles.

You don’t reach that condition overnight!

You need to develop muscle mass, lose body fat and get your blood pumping.

But you can’t rush it.

The impression I get from these ads is that anyone can get in the saddle and go flat out immediately, which at the least might result in strained muscles, at the worst, a heart attack.

Not something to smile about.

But hey, never mind that.

Just in case why not book your cremation in advance.

Funerals are the latest to feature in TV commercials.

Yes, the marketing wallahs are pushing bargain price cremations at

competitive prices, undercutting undertakers

Why not organise the deal now, get some peace of mind, and with te money left over for your family and friends to give you a good send off.

The death business must be the last remaining bastion of the human condition to be taken hostage by the ad men.

At least they’ve made death sound so wonderful a great many people now have a death wish.

Buy one get one free.  Organise your cremation with a …wait for it…with a smile. Done to a crisp.

Money back if not satisfied.

An ad typically features a big family gathering, a party, cupcakes, tea, maybe  wine.

Perhaps it’s a barbeque (Don’t ask!). It’s a wake in advance and they are all smiling at the soon to be deceased who has a got a deal to die for. And he/she is smiling broadly back at them.

These ads have surely done a lot to take the fear out of dying.

They’re all jolly japes, as if instead of booking in with your maker, you’ve won the Lottery, or a luxury holiday for one, but with a one way a ticket.

Then there are the ads for the more earthly matter of mopping the floor with a magic formula. I don’t wear a smug grin when mopping floor.

I don’t smile beautifully at the taps when I turn on in the shower. I don’t smile at the grill when cooking chicken. OK, there will probably be a hint of smile at the aroma of the gravy.

Then there are the car ads of one sort or another. One of them features that grinning Phillip Schofield stroking a cat, or parachuting in to a car salesroom.

Finally, an ad which did put a smile on my face.

It was a poster ad for Guinness, recalled g from the 1960s. This was on a huge poster site near St George’s Hall in Liverpool, which my bus would crawl by every morning.

My fellow passengers and I couldn’t avoid this huge advertising site. It was concealing a big project to build what would become the ugliest shopping centre in town.

Over the weeks, the advert would subtly change to keep us entertained, or hooked.

The message – or unique selling proposition – consisted of a picture of a pint glass of the black stuff with creamy head, and the wording writ large, 6,000,000 Guinness drank every day.

 A week or so later, a new poster would go up: gone were the bottle and the large Guinness logo. The message was the same, 6,000,000 drank every day, except all those noughts were Guinness bottle tops. Very funny.

The final design served to prove how the ad men insert messages into our minds.

The new and final ad simply stated: 6,000,000 drank every day.

No name. No image of the product.

Just a meaningless message!

Except we all knew the message by then. It made me smile!

 Clever bastards.

But not that clever that I bought  their product.

I used to work in small ad. Agencies at that time, hence my interest.  

I read “Confessions of an advertising man” by David Ogilivy of a leading ad agency, Oglivy Benson and Mather. It was a fun read in which Oglivy alludes to the dodgy image of his profession – in general, of creating a need where none existed before, of bending the will of the customer.

Oh, so you work in advertising, do you? Says the woman to Oglivy, clearly alluding to advertising being a shady profession, like being an MP.

“Yes,” he admits, catching her drift,   adding. “But don’t tell my mother. She thinks I play piano in a brothel.”

Finally, Oglivy tells of the fussy client who wants too much say in the creation of their advertising campaign.

When pitching for one big account worth £millions, the company stipulated the conditions each agency must comply with at their presentation.

Each had 10 minutes to present their case.

When the 10 minutes was up a bell on the desk would be rung and the agency people would then leave.

Oglivy suspected this client  may be too demanding.

So he turned the tables on them at the presentation.  When he entered the room he said, before we begin I have one question for you.

How many of you will be involved in approving our ideas should we win your account?

Six, they replied. 

“Ring the bell,” said Oglivy and walked out.