There’s an advert showing on TV at the moment [1] from Orange about its new price plans in which a bunch of people turn up in the desert and erect giant balloon animals representing the different options (raccoon, dolphin, mantis etc) congratulating each other all the while on their cleverness, though it doesn’t seem to me to be that much of an achievement. It’s of a piece with a trend in advertising which I’m sorry to say has caught on enough to be almost considered a genre now, so let’s give it a name - I suggest ‘The Ironic But Mawkish Festival of Pseudo-spontaneous Order’.
Basically if you’re flogging high-end consumer electronics it seems the done thing is to depict groups of either (a) sensitive trendies or (b) white-coated scientists coming together to create some colourful over-sized novelty structure or civic disturbance, each individual contributing their Own Special Talent to the grand scheme which only becomes clear when they’re all done, and all set to the sound of either plaintive nu-folk or a child singing a nursery rhyme, whichever’s more twee. The high-end advertising world appears to have gone mental for this style and is busily engaged in producing iterations on the theme, with superficial changes to setting and costumery applied to mask the dearth of creativity at work.
Orange are probably the most egregious offenders, churning out thinly disguised variations on the theme in which superficially diverse hipsters (or the entire world, yes even African children forgetting about their lack of adequate sanitation for a while) smirkingly collaborate in the kind of disruptive but whimsical behaviour which in any right-thinking society would result in a jail term or at least a severe pounding. Sony, Guinness and even fucking Skoda have gotten in on the act too, and this Honda one is so tired a knock-off I think it might have originally been intended as a spoof.
Honda should get part of the blame actually as their ad showing a Tom and Jerry-style series of minutely balanced mechanical interactions combining to no purpose whatsoever seems to have inspired a lot of the genre. The other daddy of them all is the Sony Bravia ‘bouncing balls‘ spot, which it should be said is genuinely wonderful. Both of these left the ‘creators’ out of the picture but the various copyists are keener for you to empathise so they cram their ads with either grinning tools in jeans and t-shirt or furrowed-brow boffins presumably intended to indicate that it’s okay to be a nerd as long as your skills extend to helping bake a giant cake in the shape of a car or something.
What kind of twisted sub-Jungian impulses are all these ads meant to be playing on then? Well they hit various Zeitgeisty buttons such as social networking and user-generated content, and they seek to persuade you that their products embody both play and craft, imagination and technique. But they also play on people’s insecurity [2]. Want to be seen as creative but too dull to come up with any ideas yourself? Don’t worry, buy a mobile phone and a bunch of strangers will rope you into some brilliant wheeze involving balloons, and what’s wrong with that?
[1] Can’t find it online. Why don’t companies make their ads available on their sites or YouTube or something? You’d think after spending so much money on something like that they wouldn’t try to hide it under a bushel.
[2] Though maybe I always think this because I’m insecure? No, it’s everyone else that’s wrong.
