Dan Hitchens on Something
Fighting the advertisements
Behind every slogan is a harsh voice saying “Give me money”.
The Dove Campaign to take your money?
The problem of advertising was well summed-up in the recent televised demands that we all go over to Sky Sports HD. I do not think I am presuming too much when I say that for most football fans, the old system of win-draw-lose is an adequate one for judging a game, and that the number of pixels in which the game is displayed is not a matter of great hopes and disappointments. Nobody says that, though they are happy with the three points, they wish the grass had been shown in more detail, or that, disgusted as they were with the referee’s refusal to award a penalty, at least you could see the individual raindrops on the ball.
The point of most advertising, Sky’s campaign has reminded us, is to make a luxury look like a necessity; and the problem of advertising is that so much intelligence goes into the deception. Think of how many hundred advertisements you see per day, on the internet, in magazines and newspapers, plastered all over the town centre, all of them to some extent a lie; each one of them the product of several weeks of concentrated thought from a number of highly intelligent individuals, many of them with good arts degrees, many of those degrees (it must be admitted) from Cambridge and comparable universities, or nearly comparable ones such as the University of Oxford; and all that thought is bent upon the poor rushed customer in the street, hungry, short of sleep, vulnerable to every distraction, quite weaponless against the onslaught of bright colours, capital letters and clever slogans. The customer is outnumbered as well as overpowered, and the only defence he has is his own etiolated wits, drained by regular confrontation, since infancy or possibly before, with the slick quarter-truths and brutal bullying of the advertising industry.
I don’t, to use a popular phrase, want to make a big deal out of it. But we have to recognise that there are people out there trying to make a big deal out of their dubious products, and trying to make a big deal out of us. And who are these people? Ultimately, it is millionaires who are pushing advertising in our faces. Ultimately, it is the weirdly humourless cast of Dragons’ Den who order that we prefer this type of insurance to that type of insurance or this sort of supermarket to that sort of supermarket. Ultimately, it is people who live in large and beautifully-decorated houses unsullied by advertising who pay for the proliferation of advertisements and the uglification of town centres.
We should remember that fact not out of spite or in a simple-minded spirit of “anti-capitalism”, but because it is our strongest defence against this form of deceit. G.K. Chesterton, the best observer of this as of everything else, recommended that we imagine ourselves as surrounded by a crowd of very rich men shouting “Give me money”. For, translated into English, that is what advertising slogans say. “Innocent pure fruit smoothies: Two of your five a day” means “Give me money”. “Marmite: You either love it or you hate it” means “Give me money”. Even the Budweiser parrot, when he announced “Wasssuuupppp”, meant to say, “Give me money”.
This approach is even more rewarding when applied to the most sleazily ingratiating commercials. We should do our best, when we hear “The Dove campaign for real beauty” or “Because you’re worth it”, to hear instead the words “Give me money”. What advertisers really dread is not criticism or mockery or snobbishness. All those things are part of the game. No, what makes advertisers sweat is the sound of their own voices.
Topics: Media
