Well, I can’t sleep, so I will continue my habit of writing banal crap on the internet until staring at a screen renders me useless to the world.

Being back in a domicile with a working television (much obliged, Storthes Hall) I’ve gotten back into meticulously analysing the adverts on TV, much to the annoyance of my family members. Not much has changed since the last holiday break, and on the whole I’d say the entire practice and medium of television advert campaigns, along with being pretty much obsolete anyway, is in dire need of some freshening up before they stagnate into one big self-referential blob on our viewing screens.

Seeing as running a TV ad campaign has just as much risk of putting potential customers OFF your product, I figure now is as good a time as any to shake things up. In no particular order, here are some things that really need to change in advertising if people are ever going to take adverts seriously again:

This product distracts you from your work!

The main one that springs to mind right now is the ridiculously pretentious Crunchy Nut campaign; in years to come we will mark these adverts as the first signs of Rob Brydon totally selling out. Rest assured, there are plenty more offenders to this stupid trope. You know the scene; the generic WASP-ish 9-to-5er is bored, and as soon as they dangle the brand-name moneymaker du jour in front of their consumerist noses, they’re treading over colleagues, customers and future promotion prospects to get/eat/spray themselves with it. The absurdity of the situation turns audiences off immediately; we all know no-one acts like that, and as an audience saturated with this crap since birth, we know full well that in reality that product is just as disappointing as the 5 different clones of the brand for a fraction of the price at Lidl.

This product is the future!

Ford Mondeo, “This is now,” I’m looking at you. “Oh, we’re so postmodern we don’t even have to tell you about the product, or any of its features; it’s shiny enough on its own that we can guarantee you’ll be pecking at it like the starving magpies you are!” If this actually gets a positive reaction out of anyone, then I will lose what little faith in humanity I hope I still have. Bright colours, rotating TV sets and bullshit coercive statements will not sway a modern viewing audience. Give us the pros (and cons if you’re really ballsy) of what you’re about and move on, for God’s sake.

This product isn’t what the rumours say, honest!

Cheesestrings are “just cheese?” “Nothing’s added” to McDonald’s burgers? Methinks the corporation doth protest too much. Everyone knows there’s more plastic in cheesestrings than the wrapper it comes in, and Big Macs are made out of cockroaches and pigeons. People still buy them because they’re either pissed as a fart or too poor to afford real food! Stop trying to usher in gullible X-Factor addicts and accept that you’re the soulless purveyors of obesity that you are.

The numbers don’t lie for this product…

…Except that they do. Ever spend an advertising break reading the fine print? It’s scary stuff. I once saw a cosmetic advert (I forget the brand) that boasted a 73% positive response from users, which is really nothing to write home about in the first place. What really got me, though, was that the survey they were basing it on was from a sample of just 37 women! That’s the best you can come up with?! You’ve just admitted that you’ve barely tested your brand of self-esteem wrecking poison, and even then you couldn’t get more than 3/4 of the people you tested to say they liked it? Do what every other company worth their exfoliating salt does and lie, or bribe your way to good bullshit statistics to put on the advert.

This product is on sale! (except not really)

My God, where to start with this atrocity. DFS and Dreams spring to mind, although the latter has just had it’s arse handed to it by Watchdog for their bogus “sales.” Here’s a good adage when considering “bargains;” THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO LEGALLY THAT WON’T BENEFIT THE COMPANY TENFOLD. That toothbrush that’s now half-price? The only reason they’ve slashed the price is because nobody was stupid enough to buy it at the rip-off introductory price, and they’re now overstocked with the shoddy merchandise and need to shift it before the next faddy pile of turds comes in that they need to convince you to stick in your mouth. And the furniture shops do exactly the same as supermarkets do; bring in a new range of items at rip-off rates in the few stores with the most gullible trend-hopping customers, then introduce it to the other stores at only-slightly-more-reasonable price, claiming it’s been slashed by 70% or whatever. This bullshit has to stop. I swear, I used to work at a chain supermarket (I won’t say which but has been recently surveyed as the worst in Britain) and I lost count of how many times a product at, say, “£2” would then be “£2 marked down from £4” the following week.

This product is hip!

Whoever designed Mazuma Mobile’s latest advertising campaign deserves to be locked up and forced to watch it non-stop for the rest of their days. If they really think that a service of recycling mobile phones for a fraction of the price it was bought for is a good thing to be targeting at young children, then they’re no better than the iPhone thieves who make up half of their consumer base. Trying to make an advert that appeals to kids will inevitably fail for several reasons. Namely, kids try to be adults, and so respond to adult characters in adverts just as much as adolescent ones. Also, a table of 30something suits have NO IDEA what appeals to children, no matter how many focus groups they do. Have you seen Mazuma’s latest ad? Even the most regressive of 90s kids would turn their nose up at it.

We’re not like those other ads.

This is without a doubt the most obnoxious plague of adverts there is right now,  with Tesco being the spearhead. I’ll admit that the whole white-backdrop, peaceful music, straight-talking celebrity voiceover shtick appealed to me at first. But there’s always a catch, isn’t there? The problem with this approach is it just accentuates the obvious “plumping-up” of the offer that there still is; the small-plate trick being the most insidious. Besides that, the culture of self-referential adverts is leading towards more and more empty adverts like the aforementioned Ford Mondeo campaign. Honestly, the only campaign I’ve seen use self-referentialism effectively has been Barclay’s, and they’re a bloody bank, so we know full well the product is a rip-off.

This product is a meme-in-the-making!

Have you people ever heard of the “fuck you” effect? There’s a more scientific name for it but it’s been forever since I studied psychology. Basically, there will always be a fraction of people who will take an oppositional reading to something if not co-ordinated properly. That fraction is growing as people become more and more jaded to out-of-date marketing techniques, but the absolute worse conductor for the “fuck you”s has to be this pathetic attempt at viral marketing. The “Wonga” campaign, GoCompare, and other adverts that follow the fallacious train of thought that as long as something is memorable, it will make the company money. This is false. I know for a fact that a good portion of the viewing public have made a vow to themselves never to use GoCompare, based simply on the fact that the advert annoys the living FUCK out of them. I am proud to belong to this category of people. The concept of making something catchy while eschewing that all-important need to make an ad campaign GOOD in the first place may work for the pop music industry, but television viewers aren’t the same as the mindless, MTV-drip-fed moron brigade that fuel the Top 40 every damn week.

All in all, these tropes smack of a committee banging their heads against the whiteboard, trying desperately to think of a way to mask the underlying shittiness of the product they’re peddling, and people are slowly becoming aware to the correlation between by-the-numbers adverts and disappointing products. A genuinely creative campaign that sticks in people’s heads (IN A GOOD WAY) will at least convince people to try your product and find out for themselves that it was a waste of money. I mean, God forbid you could actually sell something worthwhile.

I’m currently trying to look into the finer details of Copyright Law to see whether small samples set to audio recording from books for non-profit reasons is still under jurisdiction. So far it’s hard to get advice that isn’t in the context of a large conglomerate company.

For now I’m going to continue to play it safe with works that I am sure have become public domain until I have all the answers. It would be nice to try out and broadcast some readings of more recent works. If anyone has any advice or wisdom it would be greatly appreciated.

So, with my week off looming (and only one more seminar between it) I’ve been set a new book to complete; Jane Austen’s last novel Persuasion. I enjoyed the text set last year, Northanger Abbey. There wasn’t much in the way of plot, and the details could get excruciating at times, but the satire of the Gothic that ran through the story and interweaved with the concepts of inheritance and trust kept me interested enough to see it through until the end.

I’m almost positive that reading Austen alongside Flaubert’s Parrot (as well as The Satanic Verses, if there’s time) will prove an interesting experience at best or downright tonally befuddling at worst. Time will tell.

Being an avid reader, studying literature and looking to find a job in a career heavily focused around reading, I tend to get through a lot of books and journal articles, especially now that I own a Kindle. They may not be the very best of the best; I am yet to tackle Dostoevsky or Asimov (although the latter is on my parents’ bookshelf,) but I find myself more inclined towards much more recent literary culminations. I know I’ll never really get the best reading of most books if I don’t know the myths and older generations of texts they’re based on (James Joyce showed me that much) but if I’m serious about recording audiobooks for the new bestsellers I think it’s best that I understand the high philosophy of the medium as it is in this day and age. My modules in post-modernism, while understandably a massive headache for some, are the most enjoyable for me at the moment, because the sheer depth of their analysis through intertextuality make them a treasure trove of close reading.

Because of this, I think I should keep a list of the books that I have read, am currently reading, and intend to read in the future. Most of this may well be tied down to my course as we don’t get all that much time for personal readings, but I persevere.

So, no time like the present to comment on. The last book I finished was Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, and before that Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, both set on the 20thC Literature module. I am currently reading, out of personal interest, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. I just want to find out what the fuss is all about; more on that later, I guess. I’ve been set to read Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, followed by J.M. Coetzee’s Foe. For personal reading I have Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children on the back-burner, as well as Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. Also it might be fitting to mention that I read the first two of Frank Herbert’s Dune series last summer.

I’ve dabbled with the idea of doing a recorded reading of sections of these books (hopefully not causing any problems with copyright.) On Rushdie, the thought of Saladin’s description as a voice actor himself appealed to me, or possibly details about his metamorphosis. Vonnegut’s description of Tralfamadorian literature would make for good reading, or possibly one of the shorter stories from Carter’s collection in its entirety. If possible, any feedback on what to read on the Youtube channel would be a great help. It’s been so long since my Pit and The Pendulum recording, I really should get back into the habit.

Similarly, if there are any books I should read in the future, please don’t hesitate to suggest them to me.