I’ve always insisted that advertising does not influence me. I avert my eyes during the TV
adverts and, when I look at my Twitter timeline, I ignore the obligatory advert
flashing up just below the top tweet. Advertising passes me by, or does
it?
I belong to a monthly discussion group and this afternoon
the proposal was that advertising is evil. The
discussion went something like this:
Surely we can ignore advertising. No we can’t. We might think that we are ignoring it but it works its way into our psyche.
Surely advertising can't harm us. Yes, it can. In the last century
there were many adverts that would now make us throw up our hands in horror;
adverts for smoking that involve babies (see left), adverts using the female body to sell cars, adverts convincing us that it is good to eat sugar as
it helps weight loss.
We discussed the OXO family adverts, that ‘perfect’ 1960s
nuclear family. We remembered the coffee romance adverts and the bizarre Meercat
phenomenon. Without adverts there would be no newspapers as they rely on the
revenue but then surely prices would be lower if companies didn’t have to pay
such a lot for advertising.
We talked about how annoying it is when you click on a
website about, for example, Spanish holidays and then get bombarded by adverts
about such holidays. It’s this type of
thing that is unnerving. Advertisers are delving into our lives, finding out
things about us that maybe we don’t want them to know.
What do you think about advertising?
One of my favourite TV adverts (apart from Nick Kamen in the
launderette, of course) is Maureen Lipman and the ‘ology’ advert for BT.
What’s
your favourite advert?
