HAD BY THE AD

07-10-2006

Pete Millington wonders why some adverts work and why others don't...and whether his cows will die if he doesn't buy a Sony television

I remember watching a very good series of television documentaries a couple of years ago about the information technology revolution. I think it was quite aptly called ‘Heaven or Hell?'

An interesting statistic stuck in my mind from one of the programmes (my recall may not be totally accurate here) but it was along the lines of:

Your average citizen of countries like Britain reads more pieces of information in a single day than our ancestors two hundred years ago would read in an entire lifetime

This may not seem so totally astounding if we consider that most people two hundred years ago were illiterate, but having said that I think the point was more about the volume of information we are bombarded with as opposed to our ability to read it.

It's an interesting concept to consider from an evolutionary point of view in terms of the capacity of the human brain to cope with this massive acceleration of received intellectual data… one wonders what aspects of our bodies and brains have gone into deficit in order to compensate?

We are all aware of large chunks of the information we receive and a lot of it is of our own choosing

We decide what newspaper to buy, or magazine to pick up, we choose what television channel to watch, what website to visit, whether or not we open an email, we have some control over the snail post we receive, what radio programme to tune into, what book we curl up with…

After which it becomes a lot more random and the control goes to a greater degree into other people's hands…

The road signs we have to observe, the internal memos in the workplace, the policies and procedures pushed under our noses, the junk mail through the letterbox…

and then there are the adverts.

The dreaded adverts!

On my way to work this morning (Quinton to Yardley via Hagley Road, Five Ways, Small Heath by-pass - why am I reminded of a well known Chris Rea song?)…

I became aware, possibly not for the first time, but more astutely today because I was trying to think of a theme for my next Stirrer column, what a very interesting world is Planet Advert.

They are everywhere. On the roadside, on buildings, in the middle of duel carriageways, plastered all over taxis, stop at a traffic island and one comes creeping up beside you on the side of a double decker bus.

But in spite of the cynic inside most of us that resents their perpetual intrusion into our lives, if the truth be known, many of them are actually quite artistic and entertaining, even the ones we hate or disagree with.

Adverts in this country are of course, for the most part, very subtle. Like the classic Guinness campaign where a glass of frothy stout was represented by a fair haired handsome stranger in a dark suit - the alter ego of a glass of beer for God's sake!

(Jaysus! Can we have the toucan back please mista? We like the toucan, we don't understand the alter ego of the glass of stout, he's weird!)

Are adverts in other countries less subtle because they are not subject to the same regulatory standards?

I remember for instance going to… wait for it… India, a few years ago (no I'm not a hippy or a nun, we honeymooned in Goa) and noting that advertising was rather more blatant

I may be exaggerating slightly by suggesting that I saw huge advertising posters in the middle of parched fields with messages like “Buy a Sony television set or your cows will all die next week”

As I say, I made that one up and plucked the name Sony randomly out the air, but my point is that it wasn't far off the reality of adverts we witnessed.

In Britain, the messages are far more subtle, subconscious even: in the Third World it would be “Drink Guinness and your family will live longer”, over here we have the beer's human manifestation chatting up women on a trendy rooftop restaurant in Kensington and Chelsea.

Part of me feels more comfortable with the Indian version, at least I know a team of psychologists haven't spent 40 million pounds working out how best to enter my subliminal super sub-woofer conscious in order to plant the seed of the notion that I would like to become a living pint of Guinness.

Come to think of it, that's a very similar message to the Indian version.

In my next column I want to react to some of the adverts on Birmingham Streets. I have a few lined up already, you get to do a lot of contemplating in the daily gridlock between Quinton and Yardley.

Thank God for the adverts that's what I say.

In the meantime, what are your favourite or least favourite adverts? Which ones annoy you and which ones do you think… “hey that's good, I think I'll do that… see that… go there… buy that?”