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MAN ABOUT LONDON |
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IN ADS FROM HELL  |
First it was air pollution;
Now it's advert pollution!
By ROBERT TAYLOR
of TheColumnists.com
Ad pollution is suffocating Britain.
Excessive advertising has ceased to be a pest, and has become...a threat! So much so that the British education authorities are considering media-awareness courses for kids as young as three.
Much older children--say those of five or six--appreciate what is and what isn’t an advert, but this knowledge, it seems, needs to be instilled at an earlier age. The belief is that even young children should have an understanding of the hidden depths of TV, films and other media, and be protected from their excesses and unspoken agendas.
This is the sort of thing that Middle England abhors. Yes, Americans might need such courses for three-year-olds, but surely our children don’t! I mean, good gracious, the little darlings are barely out of the womb!
Unfortunately, such courses for young children may indeed be necessary. Advertising, even in old England, is no longer restricted to traditionally boring things like posters, TV, radio and newspapers. It’s many years since we became used to filling our garbage bins with the numerous fliers that come through our letterboxes each morning, and clearing out our mobile phones and email in-boxes of spam. Unwanted telephone sales calls during the evenings are also wearily fielded; that’s if we can hear the phone ring above the increased volume of the TV ads.
Oh, and if you fancy a day trip to an historic city such as Canterbury, you may be disappointed to see the main street filled with chain restaurants and stores--anything of distinctive local character having long been shoved aside.
But in the last couple of years it’s turned even worse. Because Britain is such a crowded little country, there are fewer and fewer places where you can escape. Put some gas in your car, and you’ll find an ad staring out from the handgrip of the nozzle. Travel on a train, and you might see an ad on the seat-reservation ticket in front of you. Go to a supermarket, and you have TV screens blaring out promotional messages above the aisles. Drive up the highway from London to Birmingham, and you’ll see giant billboards in the fields, next to the grazing sheep. I first saw such countryside billboards when on vacation in Spain as a child, and assumed them to be the sign of an uncivilised society.
Adverts are now such a menace that they’ve become a form of pollution, and anyone travelling to London these days has a very quick introduction to it. No sooner have you got through the doors of your aeroplane, and onto the gangway, than one of our biggest banks is screaming at you through an endless series of billboards that accompany you right into the terminal building. I, and others, have taken to walking past them with head down, so that they can’t intrude, just as you might put a handkerchief over your face if a car blows some exhaust at you.
Pollution is the only word for it.
Some commentators are advocating stronger regulations, and calling for a better balance between a company’s need to get its message across, and an environment in which people can be free from commercial intrusion if they want to be so. If we don’t achieve such a balance, we’ll see advertising invading more and more areas of our lives, taking up every precious bit of space we have. No doubt advertising executives are at this very moment cooking up ideas to beam giant ads onto mountainsides, or to light up the night’s sky. Or how about paying people to be human ads? It’s even been suggested that egg producers are going to offer companies the chance to advertise on the shells.
And then there are those ads that people don’t recognise as such, so that you’re never quite sure if the thing that you’re reading--or the person you’re listening to--has been paid or otherwise “persuaded” to promote a particular product.
Product placement is illegal on British TV programmes. But what isn’t illegal, yet, is paying actors to sit on London’s underground trains reading a particular newspaper, and engaging other travellers in conversation about it. Sounds far fetched … but it’s already happening.
And how about the day that Londoners woke up to find some of the city’s most high-profile statues clothed in yellow jerseys? A TV company had decided that such a stunt was the best way to promote its coverage of the Tour de France cycle race.
PR and advertising execs ask what's the harm in all this? It’s all a bit of fun, they say. Surely someone couldn’t be so stuffy and humourless as to object?
The harm is not, of course, caused by one stunt or ad campaign, but by the sheer quantity of it. According to research carried out by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority, people feel that advertising is becoming ubiquitous--it’s as much part of the environment as the traffic and the trees. And while people don’t necessarily like it, they think they have to accept it, that it’s inevitable.
And that, perhaps more than anything, is the most worrying. People no longer feel that they can stop something that they know is bad and getting worse; Britain is straining under the weight of brand promotion, but we’re resigned to breathing in its polluting fumes.
There seems to be no way out. The big companies finance the political parties, and so those parties, once in power, are obliged to dance to the big-business tune. It follows that rather than make businesses behave responsibly, the government chooses media-awareness courses for toddlers.
Isn’t it the equivalent of tackling air pollution by issuing gas masks?
©2004 by Robert Taylor.
The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895
Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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