OK a departure from politics. A welcome one to be honest.
I don't watch much telly. The 'slebs' that young kids might fawn over I simply wouldn't recognise. I was getting my hair cut the other day (I still have some you'll be amazed to learn) and they had the charts on. I realised that I had not a clue who was 'number one' in the charts. And had not had a clue for about 15 years. That's a combination of me and the fact that it's not the same. I don't think it's what it was when we used to listen as a family and I used to tape the charts on a Sunday evening way back when. Times change.
I do watch some stuff in the early evening with she who must be obeyed. And it's mainly 'Encore' and mainly Poirot. If you haven't watched David Suchet as Proirot you should. It's brilliant. Not necessarily the first time you watch or a single episode, but as a body of work. It's one of those things one appreciates more as one watches more of them and even the same ones again. Gets to know 'him' as it were. It very funny and also wonderful televised 'theatre' - more about performance, setting and story than 'realism'. But I digress.
As far as this blog is concerned, it's the advertisements that I'm interested in and disinterested in and above all, irritated by at the same time.
Every ten or fifteen minutes there's an 'ad' break and on Encore, they're always the same ads. DFS, Dolmio, IKEA, Go Compare, Barclaycard, Twix, American Express, Admiral Insurance, Churchill.
I thought that these ads we're throwback to former times. Crap ads that wouldn't be aired anywhere else and are cheap to run on this particular station. But they're not. I now see them appearing on YouTube as well and occasionally when I watch something decent (perhaps the only decent thing) on ITV - Lewis. So they're current ads.
And their sheer repetitiveness turns me right off the product being advertised - i.e. it has the exact opposite effect to that the advertisers want to achieve.
The twix ad for example. Two brothers who disagreed and then set up two different factories to make the different sides of the package. How patronising and stupid can you get? I will never, as long as I live, buy another twix, because of this utterly fatuous advertisement.
DFS 'hurry the sale ends on Monday'. Fuck off. Your sale never ends and actually I'd like to see you being investigated for this. It is fraudulent. No-one has ever bought a piece of DFS furniture for more than the sale price. So it is not 'half price'; what you pay is the full price. It's ludicrous that they are allowed to get away with this utter bullshit.
Does anyone really choose insurance on the basis that they'll get a free toy if they do? If so I'm amazed that they actually own anything valuable enough to require insurance.
Then there's the Barclaycard ad the 'I'll make the most of it' shite. Featuring a dickhead with an irritating 'son', who, when he does the thumbs up thing when his parents are getting married, I'd just love to clip round the ear.
With a cricket bat. Over and over again.
The thing is this sameness, this utter saturation of the same ads for the same things, every ten minutes, doesn't make me more likely to want to buy their products. It makes me determined to avoid them at all cost.
Then there's the ads for the homespun, small family business offering good home cooked food and ingredients, like Dolmio and Bertolli. Except that the ads end with a drop-down 'U' in the top right hand corner of the screen, telling you that in fact these are Unilever products and consequently as far from 'homespun' as it is possible to get.
The best ad on these channels is the Amex one with the patterns 'that's nine so far'. The concept is very good - essentially challenging the viewer to spot the discrepancies and, therefore ensuring that they pay attention. But after a million views it begins to wane and then irritate. It also smacks of 'big brother' which is not very comforting or attractive in my opinion.
It's obviously cheap to run these commercials now that we have so many channels 'of shit on the TV to choose from..from..from..' but I think cheap may not be 'good' in this scenario any more. When we had fewer commercial channels and fewer ad breaks, there was obviously a much bigger audience per channel and the ads had to work harder, were more expensive to make and to run (airtime) and were 'events', some were even part of the entertainment - the Smash ads, Heineken, Hamlet etc. They were also seen once or twice in an evening as opposed to every ten minutes.
One might even have looked forward to (some of) them.
That is clearly not true now - all ads now play with the sound off during my brief sojourns into the world of telly these days.
Obviously the advertising industry will not want to admit or to research in order to prove this contention, but I do really think that many if not most of these ads are now actually more irritating because of their endless repetition and, therefore, likely to generate a negative response from the 'target audience' than to drive sales. And I do mean 'irritating' in a negative way. The highly irritating 'shake and vac' ads of some years back were extremely effective and successful, so irritating is not always a negative thing.
Anyway thanks for reading, please read again before the sale ends on Monday and I'll send you your free 'Churchie' by return. That's five so far...
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