One might tend to think that this question is not worth addressing, for the answer seems so obvious.Why, advertising is simply the commercials , billboards and print ads we hear and see every day. The messages sewn onto clothing and footware, the ads in magazines, the banners towed by planes at summer beaches, the ‘advertorials’ in magazines, the banners and pop-ups or unders on websites, the ads integrated into street furniture like bus-stops, public toilets, buses, or in the tube on the walls and in the trains, the free newspapers relying on advertising, the product names stamped industrially on cars, motorbikes, stereos and TV sets, the ‘free’ gifts distributed at fairs or in the street, the samples in packets, the coupons in supermarkets, the sponsorship of yacht races, cricket matches or art exhibitions, the station identification on radio and TV, the fliers distributed at traffic lights, the junk mail in our letter-boxes and our e-mails, the product placement in movies (007 movies especially), the testimonials of stars, the T-shirts, the buttons, baseball caps, bumper-stickers, complimentary watches or umbrellas, journalists’ plugs on talk-shows or even during news bulletins, comic-strip references, cinema ads which have replaced the second feature, free game tickets – you name it, we in the West are on the receiving end of a humongous mass of promotional, sales and marketing gunk much more frequently and in more places than one can imagine ! What about supermarket trollies ? Been there. Inside toilets ? Done that. Our visible skin ? Been tried in Britain and the U.S.A on students. In kids’ schoolbooks ? Old hat already in the States. So far, only sleep, which represents approximately 30% of our lives, has escaped the clutches of advertisers, doubtless causing much counting of sheep and frustration for marketing men, poor things. However, they might just find a solution in Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’…why not just make it cool to somatose us all ? Here are a few interesting quotes from Huxley’s 1932 satirical work (soma= some sort of mescalin) :
- ‘I wish I had my soma !’ (Lenina, a character) ‘The holiday it gave was perfect…greedily she clamoured for even larger, ever more frequent doses.'
- 'Every soma holiday is a bit of what our ancestors used to call eternity.’ ‘What you need is a gramme of soma.'
- 'Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today ‘ (Lenina)
- ‘Every man, woman and child compelled to consume so much a year. In the interests of industry…’
- ‘ I love new clothes, I love new clothes, I love…’ ; ‘Ending is better than mending.’
- ‘In [Orwell’s] ‘1984’, the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain ; in ‘Brave New World’ by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.’ (soma tablets, legalizing of sexual freedom, orgies, abolition of the family). (A. Huxley’s later work, ‘Brave New World Revisited’, 1958)
More coming soon.
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