India Doyle: leave me alone

The other day I was getting my weekly fix of shitty TV, Made in Chelsea, and so had to endure ten minute intervals of adverts every five minutes of proper […]


The other day I was getting my weekly fix of shitty TV, Made in Chelsea, and so had to endure ten minute intervals of adverts every five minutes of proper television.  Obviously, for Made in Chelsea, this was a worth doing. Waiting to find out whether Spencer will stay loyal to Louise, or whether Jamie will shout ‘YEA BOI’ once more, whilst promoting his abysmal franchise, is my most legitimate form of procrastination.

However, whilst I was sitting, bleakly waiting for MIC to resume, I actually began to notice the adverts. After fifteen minutes of unacceptable jingles, they become hard to ignore. Now, I know that the whole point of advertising is to sell us things that we don’t want. However the elaborate ways that brands now go out about doing this is almost unbearable. Why does Halifax think that having people stand in a cross, singing ‘I’ll Be There’ to me will make me want to sign up to their savings account? All it makes me want to do is actively avoid Halifax, in case one of the cretins starts serenading me when I go in to extend my overdraft.

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I couldn’t help thinking, is anyone convinced by advertising? Aren’t these elaborate adverts just an increasingly patronising way of tricking us in to buying something that we don’t need?

Don’t get me wrong, I liked the Evian adverts as much as the next person. In fact, there are a lot of very clever adverts which are more creative and interesting than most of the stuff on proper television. However, it has now become a trend to try and sell everything in some sort of horrible quirky manner. Cereals, for example Kelloggs Krave, has invented an entire identity based on being ‘kooky’ and ‘eccentric’. Does anyone want their cereal to have a personality? No, you want it to taste good. So instead why don’t they just make adverts which say “Krave: it’s got some chocolate in it”.

‘Don’t be ridiculous’, I hear you mutter, ‘no-one would buy it if it said that’. To which I triumphantly retort: why not? Adverts are inescapable, but we should all be able to rise above the elaborate ploys to draw us in, and think for ourselves.

What is worse, adverts on the internet have recently started to ask the viewer to ‘choose the advert you want to watch’. I don’t want to watch a fucking advert, please oh please, spare me the indignity of actively having to participate in being sold something that I don’t want. Having to choose your own advert is the equivalent of actively walking up to a door to door salesman and saying ‘hi, please will you come and knock on my front door and try and sell me a Hoover that I definitely do not want”. No-one has ever done that. Why in the ‘modern age’ should we be subjected into doing it over the internet?

What I’m saying is that I want my personal space. I don’t want to listen to a butler sing ‘go compare’ and I certainly don’t want to ‘compare the sodding meerkat’. It would be unacceptable for one individual to bombard another individual with bullshit without his/her consent, so why is it acceptable for it to happen over a screen, or a billboard?

That’s all.

 

Image: youtube.com