TV advertising
November 22, 2010
TV adverts can be annoying or amusing. I find most of them annoying and the adverts on the English commercial channels such as ITV, Channel 4, CBS Reality, Fiver etc. are apparently increasingly geared to an audience of an IQ which is the equivalent of the plant next to my TV. Moving stick figures, repetition, words of no more than one syllable appear to reflect the low standard of education in England. Either that or they are geared to the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who cannot speak much English.
There are however several outstandingly good adverts which I always enjoy(ed). At the very top of my list was the superb 25th Anniversary Virgin Atlantic advert with the intro to Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s song “Relax” as background music. There is no speech at all in the advert – just images of an airline captain and his crew walking through an airport and the reactions of people around them. A superb ad (can be seen on youtube) which proves that you don’t need stupid, semi-literate blabla to put your point across.
Another is the meerkat series of adverts from comparethemeerkat.com – actually comparethemarket.com – the meerkat website actually exists. Rudi and I love the antics that the meerkat (and his ancestors) have got up to.
A new series of adverts for beer shows my old mate Lemmy of Motorhead singing part of “Ace of Spades” in a café but much slower than the original version. The message is “take it slow”. I rather like that version of the song.
Some more of my favourites are the Aviva (insurance) ads which feature Paul Whitehouse. I adore Paul Whitehouse, a brilliant comedian (loads of stuff by him on youtube) – he is a man of 1,000 faces. On the Aviva ads we’ve seen him as a 1960s hippy, an aging laptop user taking advantage of free wi-fi in a vegetarian café (Now, where can a chap get a bacon sandwich around here?”, and a family man buying a house in Spain or Italy, a Plymouth Argyle football fan and as a Welsh Goth.
But alas, these well made, interesting or humourous adverts only account for about 1% of the ads which are forced upon us day in, day out – the rest are just annoying, time-wasting crap made for a low IQ public – or at least that is how these ad-makers appear to view the public.
