There’s a Zen story in which a young fish asks an older fish to explain where the ocean is. The older fish laughs and swims off. Advertising is like that: the water we swim in, something of which we are sometimes hardly aware. When you’re a fish out of familiar waters, it can suddenly become visible again.
As a young child going through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin before the Wall came down, I was instantly struck by how drab the East German urban landscape became when it wasn’t leavened by advertising (the grim concrete architecture didn’t help). I’d never really valued advertising before as a source of colour and vitality.
If you spend much time shuttling between America and the UK, you are immediately hit by the difference in pace and tone of the media landscape. I remember being shocked by the pace and force of American radio ads playing on the taxi when I landed at San Francisco. In the right mood it was vibrant and exciting. After a bad flight it was like being slapped in the face while having your pocket picked.
The really jaw-dropping difference between the advertising cultures is the speed of the cuts between programming and advertising on US television. When you’re used to the relatively measured beat pause between programming and adverts over here, it can leave you furious and incredulous at the way US dramas are mangled by constant interruptions – and when you cut from ER to an ad with doctors in, it gets extremely confusing, especially after a decent gin and tonic. Yet of course when you live there you get into it, normalise it, tune in, and so you simply avert your gaze when the adverts start and go get another drink and some more gourmet potato chips, just like the natives.
Advertisers find ways, like artists, to trick us out of our familiar disengagement with the world, to make us see again. I consider myself reasonably savvy at screening out all the attempts to engage my attention around advertising. I enjoyed the first series of the ludicrous US TV drama Prison Break, and so was brought up short when walking along in Waterloo Station I looked down to see the hero of that drama, Michael Scofield, played by English actor Wentworth Miller, staring up at me through the bars of a drain.
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It was a plug for the programme, a drain-shaped poster stuck to the floor that looked like the bars of a drain, with Scofield/Miller looking up as though through the bars of his drain cage. I laughed, but I was also struck by the strained ingenuity of the ad, the painful struggle required to get us jaded consumers not just to look but to pay attention, to give a moment’s thought to the things that everyone wants to sell us. But it worked: I looked, I remembered. I’m even writing about it now.
The truth is that consumers have got much more savvy. The Simpsons Movie has lots of gags about product placement and cross-promotion of TV shows, teasing the audience about both its awareness of and its indifference to the increasingly sly and desperate ways in which advertisers try to reach them.
Personally, I’d rather not listen to advertising when I’m trying to look up a phone number, although I dare say I shall end up using the service at some point, swearing softly while I wait for the jingle to finish and the number to appear. Yet the Prison Break ad made me smile, and the product placement in The Simpsons Movie seemed funny because it was shameless and in-your-face, rather than insidious.
I’m resigned to an increasingly bonkers, overwhelming media landscape in which new commercial models and new technologies mean content and advertising writhe and intertwine in a sometimes graceful, sometimes awkward game of Twister. However, what I do notice is when I get weary of playing Twister, I find increasing value in paid-for or state-subsidised media which has very little or no advertising content. Listening to or watching the BBC, buying and reading a book, or watching a film on DVD with no commercial interruptions, are ad-free elements of my media diet which I value more and more as an alternative to the commercial dance. Sometimes it’s really nice when the selling stops.
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Michael Parsons, now Editorial Director, Consumer Media, for CNET Networks UK, spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.com