Things have gone suddenly very quiet which I should not be surprised at as it is holiday season and a lot of people will be away with their children and families. Knowing that it won’t last very long I am taking advantage to slow down for a couple of weeks. The weather is lovely and it would be a shame to be finding things to do that keeps me confined to mainly indoors.
With that in mind this week’s article is going to be more of getting a niggle off my chest rather than anything else but I wonder how many other people will agree….
I am really struggling with understanding a lot of the adverts that are being televised.
Adverts sell fantasies
Like many others I tend to record programmes I enjoy watching as it’s a good way to unwind at the very end of the day and skip through the advert breaks. It always crosses my mind that for most hour long programmes, after skipping the adverts, you are actually only left with 43 minutes of content i.e. only 64% – imagine if I did that with one of my talks!
Recently, during a bout of illness, I was confined to bed again and had no option but to sit through a few batches of adverts when I kept on catching up with the live feed. Some left me baffled:
Perfume ads. OK I get that sexy people sell perfume on the basis that those of us that use that particular brand will instantaneously become sexy but the few I saw were verging on the soft pornographic rather than summoning up illusions of sexiness. Plus they all looked so similar I would have been hard pressed to know one from the other and, for all I know, they could smell like skunk wee! (we so need smellivision)
Car adverts were also boringly similar. Yay, get this new shiny even bigger, powerful car that has a bunch of gizmos on it, find a long road in the city/countryside, drive around at night/day and take long far off shots of it. Snore.
Adverts that are far from the truth
And then the bank adverts. “you can trust us again”. Oh can you. The numerous promises of ‘we look after our customers’ may be their intention, but I haven’t heard anyone else that actually waxes lyrical about their bank. And what is it with a herd of black horses galloping along a beach meeting a bunch of humans at the end? I’m not sure what they were trying to signify with that message.
And these I actually threw my remote away in disgust – the over 50’s insurance & funeral plans. All showing actors my parent’s age group wearing padded singlets, pruning their geraniums getting excited if they were in line for a free parker pen. As a woman who is within that age group and has just bought her first Saga insurance (not because of the advert) I resent that stereotype. Most of us these days belie our age and do not potter around in our conservatory’s deadheading roses and dreaming of Nicholas Parsons (I only just about remember him). Those marketers need to take a serious new look at the new middle age. What happened to being creative rather than stereotypical?
There was one where I was curious enough to wonder ‘why?’ at. Gluten free shampoo – maybe people now eat their shampoo rather than wash their hair with it?
Yes marketers have a hard job coming up with new ideas and new ways of selling their clients products however they don’t seem to understand their target market very well or have many refreshing new ideas which is either lack of imagination or pure laziness. Give us something that we will remember the name of what it was supposed to be promoting and no longer feel patronized by outdated stereotypical scenes.