This weeks assignment asks us to take an insight that is our own and make a poster of it. I've been stumped all week. There is something singularly intimidating about making a poster out of your own words. I mean, I post on social media all the time. Those words are not really meant to be inspiring or linger on such a lasting thing as, you know, a poster as the assignment requires.
So I scoured through old posts and tweets, I considered plagiarizing my Granny who is funny and succinct, and asked my family 1000000 times if there was anything, uh, appropriate that I say all the time that sticks. It looks like in the future I will need to work on my inspirational game. *pulls collar*
I kept going back to one thing that I know I tell my kids, which is "Just because it's hard, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it". See? I can be deep. I tell them this every time they complain about XYZ (and ABCDEF……G…W) because they confuse difficult with not worth it. And then I call them on it. But it's not very catchy.
So I was making preserved lemons a few years ago. They're awesome, but a little labor intensive. You have to stuff lemons into jars with salt and spices and other things, and then you have to shake the jars every day. For a month. So I wrote this reminder on my kitchen chalkboard wall:
The original.
And I looked at it every day for a month. Maybe this makes me delusional, but it started to mean more to me than just the reminder to physically shake jars of lemons. It made me think about what lemons are. Sour little citrus fruits that are hard to ignore. Kind of like flaws. They enrich, and also sting. Shake your Lemons started to cheer me up every time I walked past it. To hell with flaws, shake those babies. Let your funny little ways be just that. Be you.
I can't even imagine a world where ads were not funny. That is their most redeeming quality. If a commercial is going to interrupt the Walking Dead on a Sunday night, it needs to be funny for me not to sear my TV with my angry thoughts. It needs to be comic relief when Carl is saying something smarmy to the adults who have survived the apocalypse, and I want to just take his cowboy hat and wring it into a ball and set it on fire, because I just hate that character that much. But I digress.
What even is funny? That's the deep question of the day. I'll give you my version.
I don't think humour has to follow a set of rules, in fact it can't. It doesn't even have to be hilarious. I think laughing is a reaction to something that is unexpected. We laugh during heated arguments. You react to a punchline because the whole point is that it connects something in your brain that you hadn't connected before. Or it's redundant. Or it's ridiculous. Or it's poignant. Or it's ironic. Or a bad pun. So a funny ad can be something that makes you laugh or something that makes you connect two ideas in a clever way which then makes the viewer think for a moment. Think differently about it. It makes them feel smart, and then they associate that feeling of genius to your product. Right?
Not a hilarious punchline, but a connection. GET IT? BEATLES/BEETLES? GET IT?
YOU, Consumer, are an INCREDIBLE GENIUS! BUY UP!
For an ad to be devoid of all traces of humour, it would need to be stripped down beyond its very concept or style, and just sort of be there. I made this to demonstrate, and I think I might have failed because for some reason after posting it, I decided that it was kind of hilarious. It must just be the unexpectedness of seeing something so stark, but it might actually make a successful campaign. Take a second, try to get past it and imagine every ad were like that, and always had been. A product/service and the company's intent. It would have failed centuries ago, and the world might be different. The world might be… dull.
Honest, bland cheese slices ad that I made.
Accidentally funny.
I think that ads teach us to ask why. Why do we need product X or Service Y? Why should we? If there isn't a good reason, there should be a funny reason. We wouldn't need to refine our ability to persuade the way we have if we didn't need to convince other people that our service/product is the best. It's almost a recipe for a terrible 90s comedy the likes of Liar Liar. *shudder*. Nobody wants that. Imagine, Don Draper shows up to his first day and shakes everything up when he draws a chicken on his beer ad. That's my elevator pitch for a spinoff, everyone. If John Hamm won't do it, let's get Sandler. Don't steal my great idea.
He played his own sister and it made it to theatres.
I feel like anything is possible. Anything.
I grew up in the 80s. My Saturday mornings were reserved for Beetlejuice the cartoon, Police Academy the cartoon, Ninja Turtles, Tiny Toons, Inspector Gadget… I loved them all. I still love them all. Saturday morning cartoons were an institution. During those cartoons, advertisers shoved as many ads for sugar and toys as they could down our throats. If the cartoons were not fun, there was the risk of switching channels. Ads were entertaining.
I remember going to school after the weekend and discussing with my friends which items must be bought. Comparing lunches. I remember wishing my parents would go to McDonalds so that I could partake in the Baby Muppet HappyMeal Toy craze. It was a craze. I felt like I needed them. I could only be happy if I had them. How could I get them if my parents didn't go to McDonalds? I was left out and felt like everyone knew, because the ad said that I had to have them.
I have 4 kids, and we have gone through the Pokemon phase, where the slogan is literally Gotta Catch Them All. ALL. You have to have them all. Whoever the evil genius is behind that racket is, they have tapped into that need kids have to fit in, and they've made it easy. They have produced 718 of them, not including their evolved forms. They have made Pokemon the currency of school yards.
And it works because kids are vulnerable, and that is why I am not playing devil's advocate on this one.
When I was a kid, I saw so many ads that boiled down to the basic message of healthy=yucky brown or green slop and sugar=rainbows of fun. Actual rainbows of actual fun. Rainbows occur in nature and they are fruity and probably wonderful.
I remember children in my class when asked what kinds of food they didn't like, the generic answer was, "HEALTHY FOOD", followed by echos of "EeEEEeeewwww". The message was in cartoons, it was in ads, and it was everywhere.
I remember, in particular, the ads for bonkers candy. They were hilarious, they made fun of adults and the candy seemed like some kind of inside joke. They were violent and great. The candy tasted like any other blob of sugar, but it seemed better because we could pretend that fruit was falling from the sky. We lived in the golden syrup era of sugar. The ads made this candy an important part of fitting in. I knew that red bonkers were the most coveted, and if I had them I was boss.
When advertisements drown out the voice of reason for children, and put them in a position of being an outcast if their parents don't succumb, they become dangerous. When the message cries over the voices of parents, and health professionals that sugar and chips and pop are fun snacks, it is ingrained in developing minds. It's habit before we even know. Advertising sugar and junk food to children is planting a seed very early on and setting people up with lifelong dependencies, weight problems, health problems, and can easily be categorized with ads for smoking as morally corrupt.
I believe adults can make informed decisions on their own, but directly marketing false information about products that can destroy health is something that needs to be checked, because vegetable farmers will never ever be able to compete with Nestle or Wonka.
