Monthly arts and media column

Having just moved to the country with the boxes barely unpacked, I’m confessing that I haven’t seen much media lately. So I’m sitting down to write the media column with not much inspiration.

The problem I’m finding is that unlike the zapsville of London Bridge where I used to live, there just isn’t so much in-your-face media here in rural Surrey, particularly in the realm of advertising. I sit in the garden and hear real, unmediated cows mooing in a nearby field. I drive around through tunnels of un-billboarded overgrowth. Horses trot by and the rain splashes down without a logo in sight. Not a snifter of persuasion from anywhere.

Adverts in your face

Of course, that isn’t strictly true. I can still read newspaper headlines as I drive past the lonely village Spar on the school run. I can listen to the radio. There are televisions out here too, I’ve discovered. But I think the difference is that those are all choices. I used to imbibe media messages without even choosing to do it. When I took the Central line to Oxford Street and walked up to Portland Place each day, I reckoned on having to say, ‘No, I don’t need that’ in my head at least 100 times before I’d even started work.

Advertising has always been a central part of a thriving city. I’ve just been reading a history of Pompeii by Mary Beard and finding out all about the central role that advertising played in Roman life back in the first century AD. There were adverts for gladiatorial fights, political campaign posters, villas for rent, fish sauce, bars and brothels, all filling vast proportions of blank wall space in Pompeii. Sign writers were highly valued and sought celebrity status through signing their work and adding comments of their own to their artwork.

Brand identity

Even today, adverts and advertisers often seek a status in the public consciousness that goes beyond simply plugging a product. Companies would actually rather gain a ‘brand identity’ that inspires loyalty in customers instead of simply shifting its products. I’ve just been watching a couple of campaigns on YouTube that have managed to embed themselves in the public imagination, like the Dairy Milk drum-playing gorilla or the flashmob-style Liverpool Street station dancing for T Mobile. These adverts have produced the goose that lays the golden eggs; a momentum that is carried not by the client’s money but by the public and its use of the media. Take the comparethemarket.com campaign for example, featuring Aleksandr, a Russian meerkat. He speaks a bit like Borat, the joke being that he is saying ‘compare the market’ but it sounds like ‘compare the meerkat’. It’s a weak joke but it works brilliantly on your memory. His catchphrase ‘Simples’ actually won an award for best ad slogan of the year. And here I am adding to their PR.

Advertising crunch

All of the ad campaigns that I’ve mentioned are very simple and cheap. They are a long way from the transformers-style cars ad which cost millions but can you remember which car it’s for? It is generally the case that a decrease in advertising budgets is going hand in hand with the crunch. Less advertisers equals less money for ITV to make new programmes which equals more need to give advertisers cheaper ways to advertise, like within programmes themselves. Recording artists like Lily Allen are finding that fewer record sales means turning to advertising to sustain themselves. Allen has always been extremely antagonistic to the use of over-thin models but has recently become the face of Chanel handbags in order to make ends meet. Advertising is ultimately very irritating simply because it can weaken our list of priorities. It encourages us to serve ourselves, rather than God.

There is a well-known advertising legend that tells the tale of a washing powder manufacturing company who wanted to extend its market into the Middle East. The adverts featured three pictures with a pile of dirty laundry on the left, the product in the middle and clean laundry on the right. They forgot that in Arabic, you read from right to left, making the advertising campaign a total failure.

Doomed campaign?

When Jesus calls the crowd to follow him in Mark 8.34, it looks as though he too is embarking on a doomed advertising campaign. Here he tells them: ‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’. Saatchi and Saatchi would surely rather die than associate themselves with campaigning like this. No political wannabe in Pompeii would ever promote themselves in this way. As a brand identity it is sheer lunacy.

Yet this is the best advertising of the lot because it tells us about things as they really are. It is the PR that we must take notice of because, as Jesus continues in verse 35, ‘Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it’. Let’s try and put THAT on the buses!

Are you trying to sell me something?

Adverts in your face

Brand identity

Advertising crunch

Doomed campaign?

Eleanor Margesson

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