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In the happy, happy world of commercials, teeth are always white, computers don't crash and cars are always new and rust-free. We are consistenly presented with an image of a perfect world that the real world will never live up to, no matter how much we spend. I don't dispute the right of companies
to promote their products, but it does give a rather one-sided perspective on the world and I think it leads to quite some disillusionment.
If companies were banned from promoting their own products but allowed to denigrate the competition instead, commercials would become a very different experience, exposing some home truths that manufacturers would rather you didn't know.
"San Marco frozen pizzas. Taste just like mama made them in a factory and froze them for a year."
"New Mars Delights! Yet another chocolate bar made by combining other chocolate bars. For that price you could buy a newspaper and learn something!"
"BT Broadband - connecting the UK. Three weeks late on average."
"Dasani! It's 0.001p worth of bottled tapwater, but you can get it for only 75p!"
Outright factual lies would be banned, but anything else is fair game.
Of course this system would be just as unbalanced but in the opposite direction, so the law would only apply in odd years.
Subvertising
http://subvertise.o...me.php?theme=CONSUM
Strong stuff, but some gems. [moomintroll, Nov 23 2004]
Adbusters
http://www.adbusters.org/spoofads/
Nice link [moomintroll]! Here's another one for you in case you don't know of it. [wagster, Nov 23 2004]
Antivert
http://www.rxmed.co...%20A)/ANTIVERT.html
Pfizer's antivertigo drug [reensure, Nov 24 2004]
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don't you diss goodfellas. I'm their number one fan. |
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gotta give ya a fish for that. |
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Yes, I'd like to see the end of the shiny-toothed, but will award my Croissant due to it potentially causing the end of advertising altogether since it may well be cost effective not to advertise at all, rather than to spend money on trashing your competition... |
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On reflection though, I'm going to take it back again since it would be easy to set up a 'non-affiliated' company that sold cheap inferior products, but which spent huge sums of cash on telling everyone how great your company's pies tasted. |
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yep! you got my vote - seriously, I have written fan letters to Goodfellas - they love me! |
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// computers don't crash // |
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And they have no cords, either. In fact, no electronic appliance has a cord. (e.g. check out the Sharper Image Ionic Breeze commercials, and the Roomba ones too, where the room's floor is completely empty) |
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Hey Vinnie! Dis is po. She's a good fella. Capiche? |
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Kinda baked in the form of the 2004 election campaigns. Ratio of roughly 1 ad supporting each candidate to 20 smearing them. |
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Yeah I'm with UB. Baked in that there film with Dudley Moore. |
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The only thing is there, it was used to sell the product (not to denigrade someone else's). I do think this has been baked by coke & pepsi in many countries where this is allowed. |
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and easyjet do tend to let you know how expensive everyone else is, and keep a little more quiet about the fact they they are flying 'near' to the city you'd like to be in.. |
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... and of course sex sells _everything_, even socks. |
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There is what could I s'pose be called an art form known as subvertising, which is not exactly the same but similar. My favourite was an anti-globalisation poster which played on the old Nike 'Just Do It' tagline: it was a photo of riot police protecting NikeTown during anti-globalisation riots, with the line 'Just Try It' underneath. Loved that image, and if I ever find it in a decent resolution I will frame it. |
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[link] - most of it is political stuff, which was a bit too much for me, but some of it is very witty - particularly liked 'where do you want to go today?' |
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And, of course, 'buy nothing day UK', which is next Saturday, coincidentally. |
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I fear an entire year of negative advertising would really get me down - can we apply it every other day instead ;-) |
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You know, I saw this on TV last night. |
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In a mockery of the AOL commercials where an adorable upstart questions the nearly-hip, young-but-professional board members about why they can't have this or that and the board members say "Okay, you've got it!": |
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A woman walks into a board room plastered with AOL-like logos, and starts rambling on about spyware and spam and viruses and wanting protection from these myriad malicious threats, and the suits all nod their heads. Then she says "I want it for $9.99 a month!" and one of the suits says "Hah! You'd have to go to NetZero for that!" |
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Then, the NetZero logo comes up. Kinda baked, although it still gets my bun. (Despite the tinge of advocacy/lets all.) |
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Yeah--baked, advocacy, lets all, wouldn't it be nice, still gets a double bun. Miller does this to Budweiser, too. |
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This would further the cola wars into a whole new dimension. Just look what happened in Brasil. |
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i thought there was gonna be a link with that statement <HTJ> so dont keep me in suspenders. what happened in Brasil? |
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You would have to add some indemnification, as negative adds already can happen, and would be effective, but just aren't done since it would cost a lot of legal fees in civil suits & countersuits. We'd need to give negative ads some free-speech protection like we do for satire. |
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fyi: "buy nothing day" in the US is the day after thanksgiving. Nov 25, 2004 this year. |
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questioning your consumerism is very healthy. |
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thinking you already have adequate defenses up while being unconsious against a $100 billion advertising / manipulation industry is foolish. |
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<slight rant> Yeah [sophocles] - that's what really gets me. I'm extremely cynical about advertising (Halfbakery Classifieds excluded!) and pay no attention to what I'm told to buy, but if you say "Washing up liquid" I still think "Fairy". Much, much worse is that if you say "Fairy", I think "Washing up liquid" - how bad is that? This stuff is programmed in on a very deep level by simple repetition and there's not a lot we can do about it, there really are no adequate defenses. I'm sure it would help if I watched less TV, but there's still radio, newspapers, billboards, the internet, it's just everywhere. </sr> |
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[etherman] - The cola wars destroyed hundreds of lives and actually resulted in violence, occasionally armed, at times. Sorry, couldn't find a link. Saw it on the Discovery Channel between the documentaries on sharks and Nazis. |
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I've had the suspicion that advertising agencies secretly do this for products they don't like already. I can imagine them sniggering at getting paid to slag the stuff off. |
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Here are some things I've learnt from watching adverts: |
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Being in the (British) army is more unpleasant than cleaning the toilet using your fingernails. |
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Brittas water filters do something scary to water (Ice *sinks*). |
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Driving skoda cars makes people panic and run away. |
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People hate a different brand of car so much that they will go out of their way to destroy it. |
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I'm gonna let you brits in on a little secret. Dasani water is bottled in Brooklyn, NY. Tasty. |
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Like this?
----soundtrack plays bam bam bah bam bam bam, "Ford is the Best in Texas" as a young man walks down the railroad tracks (that the railroad killer is suspected to frequent) to reach the Ford dealership. |
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He reaches the dealership, pays the $2000 for the repair of his air conditioning system, cooling system, alignment, and brakes. |
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He then gets in his car relieved that the nightmare is over and heads home. He does not make it. Near his home he serendipitously sees the cooling gauge about to redline and shuts his car down. |
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As he opens the door and exits his car the pressure in the hose pops off one of the hoses that was never re-clamped (as required for system containment) and a jubilent cloud of steam erupts from under the hood. |
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Migrant construction workers all stop to stare as the music continues: bam bam bah bam bam bam "Ford is the Best in Texas".? (and then there is my other Ford, bought before this incindent that is best not mentioned.) |
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Some products advertise themselves and some antivertise themselves. |
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Jarod from Subway's an example of the latter. |
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A bit like Brazilian presidential elections. |
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"Orange: don't let a mobile phone ruin your movie" |
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//I'm gonna let you brits in on a little secret. Dasani water is bottled in Brooklyn, NY. Tasty.// |
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Are you serious? There's this rumor that water companies don't have any water cleaners or anything to clean the water before they bottle it, I'm not sure if it's true or not. Surely they would wouldn't they? |
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I hate consumerism, I hate advertisements, I hate being threatened and insulted by advertisements, I cannot stand the arrogance of advertisements either. |
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Just watch the new geico commercials, with the talking gecko, that should sum up what I meant by the above. Oh, and the telecom commercial, with the butcher talking about the network, and brandishing a knife in front of the camera. I am pretty sure the general idea in that commercial was to threaten the audience with a knife, and the butcher's backdrop was just to clear the legal barrier. F*cking telecoms, who the fuck needs a fucking cell phone anyway? Or an iPod? Music bites the big one. |
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They pronounce geico "guy-co", yet I'm pretty sure it's just another way to say: "Gay-co". |
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Took me back years ago to Rhetoric class-the assignment was to write a satirical commercial-we had to present it in front of the class which was an awful experience :-) I wrote about my cat who liked to get up on the back of the couch and lick my mother's hair(spray.) That was when women had helmets for hairstyles. |
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They call it a Milky Way bar for the following reason: |
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"If you take a bite out of a MW bar, you notice in the cross sectional area of the bar that it is very top heavy with dense carmal on the top and light fluffiness on the bottom. This causes the bar to turn-over in your mouth as you're chewing it, and the super sticky carmal sticks to your teeth with each successive mastication. Put another way, you form another 'spiral galaxy arm' sticking to your teeth as the overall massive cud is still turning over in your mouth. After you swallow the lump, you've got a bouyant spiral galaxy shape floating in your stomach that starts spinning faster and faster each time you stomach does it's churning thing. It's really gross and the angular momentum can actually give you a stomach ache after an hour or so! Also, the angular momentum (spinning) continues long after it gets flushed down the toilette until it hits the intake screen in the sewage treatment plant." |
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