Adverts

While wondering what illegal drug some young flash Harry in the advertising office had been shoving up his nose I watched his latest car ad on the telly. Car ads, as you know, tell you nothing about the car, but lots about the small willy possessed by the man who is looking to buy! The car is hoisted on balloons, or melts like mercury across the screen, maybe it drives across the Nevada desert and is driven by handsome (white) well heeled males who are going places. Soon hopefully! The cretin, pushing his baseball cap to the back of his head and tossing a banana peel out the window, has watched those ads and now while trudging along in the fog at six miles an hour, alongside the many similar oiks, dreams he is in Nevada somewhere. The advert has satisfied his mind and taken from him all reality.

It was ever thus! Adverts are not there to tell the truth, they of course only want to sell! This Guinness one certainly did, the slogan supposedly coming from a man who answered the question,"Why do you drink it?" With the answer "Because it is good for me." His wife, seeing him carried home and dumped in the front garden, had other ideas I bet, especially when his liver gave out and he passed on leaving her "£7.10 shillings in insurance money. (If that happened of course....) In recent years the ad was dropped because the law was tightened up, and not before time, to end much of the deceit practised on us by advertisers. There being no proof that Guinness actually is 'Good for you,' the slogan was dropped. A shame as no-one really believed that anyway. Well apart form several million Irish drunks of course. Today Guinness ads make no sense whatsoever as they strive to replace the old generation of drinkers with a new younger set more used to the feeble lager and invented alcohol products designed by Mammon loving brewers and sought after by dunderheads.

I like the old poster adverts, they always appear to me to be better drawn and more enticing, even if I remain unconvinced about spending my coppers on the product offered. We think we are not motivated by them yet, years later, we remember the slogans or tunes that accompany telly adverts, and the posters remain deep within our memory.

"You'll wonder where the yellow went,
when you brush your teeth with 'Pepsodent."

I often wondered where 'Pepsodent' went myself. Nobody as ever told me. The sound has remained with me, and we did buy the stuff when I was still finding difficulty in beginning the joined up writing at school. Mind you I was 34 by then.

The change in the law, I think I am right in saying it was the '196o Trades Description Act,' but I am willing to be proved wrong stopped many a false advert from ripping of the gullible. One trick was to advertise "Cup Final Seats," in the classifieds, and folk would send of their ten shillings expecting a ticket for the Cup Final, a great day out for the Englishman in the fifties. They would be somewhat nonplussed to receive a small stool with "Cup Final," written on it. But it was a 'Cup Final Seat'! For a year or two I worked (Ha!) for the Advertising Standards Authority, an organisation that to some extent reduces the misleading nature of many adverts but is in truth is a waste of space. Complaints arrive once the ads have appeared, and by the time an adjudication is arrived at the ad has run its course, profits have been made and a mere warning is issued. In theory individuals can be barred from placing adverts but the organisation does not go to court to fight such people, leaving that up to the Trading Standards folk, so it is in many respects useless! Most of the girls were nice mind you, young, attractive and intelligent, just how I like them! However, possibly a point connected to their intelligence, they did not like me as I am! How insensitive of them I say. I do dislike it when young lassies refer to me as 'Dad' or 'Uncle!'