Better Living Through Advertising
An industry of lies or window to a more perfect world? Josh Russell asks whether life could do with a rebrand.
In the world of adverts we are all either young and beautiful or old and oozing with proverbial wisdom. There a very few problems that cannot be overcome with a cup of tea or a watery microwave korma. No one is ever lonely or sick; there’s no stain on the soul that can’t be shifted with a squirt of Vanish or a spoonful of Cillit Bang. Pets comfort us in our darkest hours, distracting with their boundless mischief and never once taking it upon themselves to lick all the upholstery or piss all over your new shag carpeting. People bend the dimensions of space with their flexible phone contracts. Technicolour TV screens chase each other down the street. Car headlights dance in the desert to the soundtrack of a rising sun.
It is undeniably a seductive world and one that any sensible human mind rails against like Rupert Murdoch against state-owned broadcasting. There is very little truth to the promises we are made and yet somehow, infuriatingly, it is incredibly difficult to break the hold advertising has over us. The question we have to ask ourselves is that given the fact we all know there is little actual substance lurking behind the sleek veneer, why do we fall for it time and time again? Is it that we are so desperate to part with our hard earned cash that we’ll buy any old tat endorsed by a familiar face or is there something deeper going on?
I am here to propose a new theory to you. The thrall advertising holds over us is nothing to do with gross commercialism or greed. It’s not even that we have grown used to its ubiquitous presence like an unpleasant odour in a stairwell or the hum of a laptop fan. Our love affair with advertising is based on one fundamental truth: the glossy world of adverts has it right. It’s our world that has got things wrong.
Billboards in Union Square, San Francisco
A bold claim you may think but give it some thought. Consider what we have to deal with in our daily lives. Global debt is rising. Britain is still acquiring enemies like an art student acquires STIs. In the face of mounting pressure from all quarters, Gordon Brown is starting to tremble and make deeply unsettling clunking noises. And yet at the flick of a switch we can immerse ourselves in a fantasy world where sofas are cheap all year round and drinking mineral water for 14 days will make you anything apart from considerably less well off. We can plug ourselves up with cats offering advice on which pet food contains the most nutrients and toddlers that are CEOs of major corporations, despite having a woefully limited knowledge of European commercial regulations.
The more you look, the more savage injustices you find hiding behind every line of copy, yet more reminders of how our world lets us down. Freedom is not only a drive away. A man can’t win his beautiful neighbour’s affections by merely finding the right shade on the Dulux paint chart. Chemicals don’t make you look younger; they just help you die quicker. The world of adverts has cute little fuzzy-felt cows that get up to amusing antics in velveteen fields. What do we get as an alternative? Lumping, great monsters that stand around looking lugubrious and occasionally squeezing out shit. No matter how you look at it, reality seems to be as resistant to the concept of a narrative conceit as a Yorkshire bus driver is to make change.
Travel also seems to suffer a bit of a deficit between perception and actuality. A tour operator shows you cream coloured sands. You and your partner are on the getaway of a lifetime. They show you eating in wonderful restaurants, drinking good wine, swimming in the azure expanse of a gentle sea. You hang a shell a wonderful shell souvenir around your partner’s neck, bought from a local market store. A bronze skinned 20-year-old guides you around the island, showing you sights that the average tourist will never get to see. A holiday you will never forget.
Khezr Beach, Hormoz Island, Iran
Unfortunately, the reality is slightly different. The gritty grey sand is littered with condoms and sun-bleached turds and you become so paranoid of the weird wriggly things on the seabed that you don’t put even your little toe in the murky water. The local plonk gives you a fucker of a hangover; on the third day a substandard restaurant introduces a gut-blending parasite into your lower intestine. Your partner spends more time eyeing up the young local than sighing over beautiful sights. When you reach the border, a disgruntled guard fingers the memento around your partners neck and disapprovingly tells you that removing shells from the country comes with a five-hundred-pound fine. A holiday you will never forget. No matter how hard you try.
Something has clearly gone wrong somewhere. For years we have been promised a future of golden health and technological wonder and yet, year on year, all the world has given us is an encroaching obesity epidemic and instant-access porn. Growing up, I truly thought we were reaching an age where we’d be able to taste colour and beautiful music would issue forth with every movement of our limbs. Now I know my future only contains disappointment, bedsores and wanker’s wrist, I feel decidedly let down by our version of events.
I’m not claiming for a second that the rampant commercialism of the world of advertising doesn’t rankle slightly but you do have to admit that they’ve kind of got us up against a wall. Reality just can’t compete with what they’re hawking. When asked to choose between a world of terrorist attacks, testicular cancer and David Cameron for one of Sony Bravias, Honda Accords and Mylene Klass, very few people with any common sense would drop Mylene and her bikini for David and his intolerable smugness. The soft lies beat the hard edges of truth hands down.
Burger King logo amongst pile of scrap
The fact is that humans find it far easier to deal in abstracts and lies than in actualities. We treat life like a film, with peaks and troughs, working towards an epiphany that we secretly know won’t come. The way we view our world is permanently tinted by our expectation that things should obey certain narrative conventions, despite the massive amount of evidence to the contrary. Adverts, with their fabrications and aspirations, seem to make more sense to us than a cold, hard reality because the world of advertising cossets us, makes us feel like we can obtain a charmed life that so far we have been denied. The mistruths of adverts offer a far more aesthetically pleasing view of the world and, as the late, great Douglas Adams once propounded, given that “beauty [is] truth, truth beauty”, surely in this case the “guilty party [is] life itself for failing to be beautiful or true”?
The aspirations of advertising, the aesthetic we are all sold is undeniably more palatable than the reality. Rubicon is sunshine in a can. Elderly men can break into a major football stadium without being rewarded with a night in a cell and a couple of cracked ribs. We are happy to believe any lie thrown at us, that cooking is “as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4” and that a spritz of after-shave will secure a quick clinch on a rain-drenched street, no matter how many burnt woks and eyefuls of pepper spray proclaim otherwise. Cherry-lipped kisses are somehow far more appealing solution to sore throats than a musty lozenge that tastes of perfume and death.
Like or loathe advertising, you have to admit that it offers a breadth of experience and emotion that few ever get to realise in their daily lives. During my commercial break I can watch a man trace colours around city streets with his fingertips. A harem of women pout and preen at me, stirring what little life my shrivelled genitals can muster. I live a thousand different lives an hour, from successful businessman in New York to an animated germ under someone’s toilet rim. Every road practically pulses with life changing events; sentient cars play hide and seek and crazed electronics companies flood whole districts with bubbles.
It’s a vibrant existence, living through advertising, one that trumps reality hands down.
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Resources:
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – Fit the Tenth, [radio programme] BBC, BBC Radio 4, 23 January 1980.
Slogan from recent Marks and Spencers promotion.
Images:
Union Square Advertising: an original photograph by Shearer Family.
Khezr Beach, Hormoz Island, Persian Gulf, Iran: an original photograph by Hamed Saber.
Dec07 261: an original photograph by Lord Jim.
All images appear under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.
Title Image:
Advertising imitating art: an original photograph by Dan Taylor. Modified image appears here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.
