Direct Line
We are told to insure everything – even that National Express single to Swansea or some pretty girl’s face, for if she loses her looks she may lose her man and, er, somehow you can price that up. Do people realise insurance is just another massive revenue stream for big business and has nothing to do with altruistic concern for the little people? At the sell-side they call it ‘securitisation’. I’ve never owned a car so have never seen the point of car insurance – just seems like one pointless extra cost of many. No claims bonus? Big deal. But you are society’s outcast if you don’t comply, so the general and legal will strongly encourages you to.
As does smellyvision. Car insurers saturate TV with their products, from 9am Trisha to 11pm Norton and all points inbetween. Churchill goes for the funny dog with Reeves & Mortimer accents, new boy Esure employs the device of belief suspension, until Michael Winner tells the enraged lady to “calm down dear, it’s only a commercial”. Hilarious. No, horrendous. And you suffer the bloated ex-director’s bulbous mug all over train and tube ads.
But my favourite is Direct Line, with its 30 something-couple and its changing script, like Nescafe in the 80s but this isn’t romance this is insurance and you’d better get covered if you’re embarking on a serious relationship. So hard-working northerner-down-south ‘Leanne’ and slacker ‘Si’ are at the petrol station. The latter probably fills his time laying down some tracks or grappling with his manuscript; whatever, they’re both execrable figures. Anyway, he ‘went with’ Direct Line (getting a good grope) to save ££££ – though of course it would have been Leanne doing this in real life – so he could “spend money on outrageous gestures like this’: pulling down a bouquet from the new Beetle’s roof. That stuff ain’t lovely, it ain’t even life; some chancer would have had those flowers off the roof in seconds.
The Telcos
Before we start we should say that in 30 seconds TV adverts can be as fine an artistic distillation of our multifarious modern lives as any killer pop song or moving music video. Their creative force is not in doubt, it’s just that too often eager-to-please sloganeers rely on easy emotions or apply some facile dialogue or visual twist. Emmerdale trailer Heinz’s ‘It’s all going on’ reprise of yoof’s ‘going off’ jargon is an example of such abject laziness. Too many people in the industry doing too little with the technology available to them.
Just like it will be with 3G technology. Here though 3’s adverts have chimed with real life; it seems that people really will use them for pointless, titillating, often alcohol-fuelled video messaging. Is that all it’s good for or is that all we’re being told to use it for? Hutchison Telecom is in a race against time to make money before either their bank managers call time on the expensive project or the current GSM operators enter and take over the market, so its lowest common-denominator approach is a predictable one.
In 2G-land things are still very much as you were. O2-Arsenal is still peddling its future bubbleworld, undermined slightly by Sean Bean’s over-literal pronunciation but bolstered by the latest quirky leftfield chill-out tune that will give some bedroom producer a fair whack in royalties over the next few months; Vodafone-Man U is still so painfully groovy and hip, the best thing that could be in your sad life; while The Carphone Warehouse has roped in A-list luvvy (in 1976) Maureen Lipman to promote Charles Dunstone’s latest brilliant retail scam. I have not seen any T-Mobile ads recently.
Overall the phone firms are not quite as excruciating as the car makers in their peddling of products as essential lifestyle components. Just give it a while.
Digest of pre-blog entries...
27 June 2003
A slight change of tact this week, yet the way these vacuous ninnies promote nothing more than their themselves certainly qualifies the programme as a spastic advert. I’m talking about Big Brother of course. Yes, I’ll watch the odd minute as mindless channel surfing takes hold. Initial watercooler talk was that in this series they had unearthed a particularly dull set of trendy young clones. Further inspection revealed them to be even worse, shallow insipid robots all. Everything to wear but nothing to say. Jon suggested that he could be this series’ Brummy Dean-style thinker but his rampant materialism blew it. Are they told never to talk about politics, culture, to never reveal their pride and prejudice? Sure I could pass late-night minutes ogling recent evictee Tanya, but the girl’s a blank page. What did you learn about yourself? she was asked. “Just things I already knew,” she revealed. Umm, quelle learning curve.
If the glimpse of the Johannesburg BB crudely revealed African ‘dancing and hollering’ stereotypes, in our set up we are certainly seeing a microcosm of British existence – reserved beyond function, deeply conservative mores, fake harmony, etc. Where all this cuddling comes from I don’t know, a by-product of 76 series of Friends? If I was in there, I’d like to think I’d wash somebody’s plate up but still call them a cunt if need be. That African transaction twist showed the inherent redundancy of the format. Such a change and still nothing exciting to report. But it’ll get reported of course in ‘newspapers’ such as the Sun or Star. They’re really going to struggle when the comp comes to its logical conclusion with Nush or Gos winning and those ‘my amazing life’ splashes don’t quite tally with the numbing reality.
“Who d’you think is going to win?” Davinia McCall asked one of the rentacrowd outside (I’ll use her full name even though the Heat generation insists on calling celebs by first name). The trendy young twenty-something’s eyes rolled out of sync as he bawled out something like “I don’t care as long as you’re here to present it Davinia”. Let’s hope the lifeless fuck got beaten up in Bow on his way home.
13 June 2003
Long the critical pariah of the London airwaves, Capital Radio presents a relentlessly chirpy and commercial take on metropolife filtered through the good time music of the current hit parade. It is based in Leicester Square, that tacky, touristy garish slice of WC2 the perfect place for its low aspirations for the radio medium. It gained a name for Chris Tarrant's big cash giveaways in his morning quiz shows, while latterly the advert with its larger-than-life presenters towering over a softer, less menacing London as Paul Joakenfold's 'Starry-Eyed Surprise' plays won it some admirers but many more despisers. This writer has the mid-90s mental scars of it being the chosen station at a Home Counties packing factory. "Fucking shitheads", I'd curse to myself as 4 Non Blondes came on for the fifth time that day.
Capital Radio is Angus Steak House, All Bar One and the latest hi-tech gadget. Its vision of life is as one-dimensional as its playlist. Be happy, have a good time in the main stream and buy lots of product - a simple mantra for its simple listeners. This is never better demonstrated than in its current TV promo, where smiley people, even cops, sing along in harmony to the latest tunes. But the piece de resistance is the trendy black mother getting her kid to mouth the "Girls don't like boys, girls like cars and money" anguished refrain of latest US MTV puppets Good Charlottes. Get yourself capitalised son before you can even speak properly. Abhorrent stuff. It really is.
6 July 2003
Adverts for their own station are best. They're all at it, aren't they? BBC isn't shy about spunking ££££ on their own future failures and Channel 4 can always be relied upon to stick a gratingly up-to-date pop dance number to advertise their offput. Biscuit-taker at the mo' though has to be ITV's one that merely masturbates over their presenters in turn. Bloke-bird Gabby Yorath, desperate loner Gerri Halliwell, even F1 bore Jim Rosenthal gets the stylised treatment. Setting: is the 3-2-1 camera-ready setting, but this is a behind-the-scenes slow-mo look at their 'real' personality when they're off-camera. Even though they're on. And they're not saying anything. Music: typical moody acoustic piano/guitar rubbish that's bound to be David ColdGray or someone. Effect: well it's meant to be a harmless ad-link piece but the demented defaecation, sorry deference of the overall manic sheen means the reaction is involuntary emetix.
29 May 2003
KFC marketing radges recently hit on the notion that the black community likes to eat its finger-lickin'-good products, so the branding changed accordingly. Out was the good old dancing Colonel and in came the 'Soul Food' label. All we need now to accompany the adverts is soul music, they mused. Can't go for any obvious Al Green or Smokey to demonstrate the quality of the products - oh no - we're cool and elitist sales executives ourselves. "Got it, let's go for northern soul classics". About as inventive as Johnny Vaughan's hilarious Northern soul Patrol situationist office pranx.
Which brings us onto the other inconsistency. They realised 'northern' was a music much loved by whites in this country so the black flagging shifted to a more amorphous young and trendy social grouping. Look at these fuckers, spinning their zinger as if they would their records (like in the first of these quick-changing shorts) and handing out wings like they're pills (about the same price) at some exclusive outdoor gathering. Of course, there are black people involved - like in real life this caucasian group loves to assimilate one or two gentrified ethnics. The trendy clothing, the rare music, the food - once again these marketeers are selling us an experience. Which is so very far from the truth. Do you use KFC as an integral part of your social life? No, it's 11:30pm and you want something in minutes. No it's mid-afternoon following a big night and it's one of the few things you can face eating. Convenient fast food, give it here student.
To be fair, KFC product doesn't seem to have as much as pumped steam in them as their Tennessee, Texas or whatever deep south areas these god-forsaken franchises choose to call themselves after. They're like a cancer taking root in all our towns and cities - one in every street just as there's a '6 for 5' booze place, a shit kebab house and far less of the real places that matter like post offices. Wow, four wings and chips for a quid. Ow, fucked-up stomach for the following week.
