Blog #10 Advertising is…

To me, advertising is a map.  This is a map of Montreal by Jazzberry Blue. 

Advertising directs, compartmentalizes, and highlights.  It grows and changes.  I look at this map, and I'm drawn to the large portions first, to the areas that break away from the grid, and then to the roads asking you to follow them, wonder what is underneath and wonder how it will morph over time. Taking me to what I need and what I want.

Montreal in particular is an old and new city.  It's beautiful, happy, sad, shiny and crumbling, full of life and full of art. 

Blog #9 Shmethics

If you can't convince them they need it, make the feel like they deserve it.

Or

 Is advertising unethical?  Buy your vote here #yes #no

Blog #8 Sneaky Cheaty Businesses and their Ads.

Advertsing for the likes of Ashley Madison. Should they be allowed to do it?

Ugh.  I guess.

Ashley Madison eh?  A company that is immoral, reckless, cold-hearted, cruel, deceitful, sneaky, I don't like it, and it's legal.

It's a legal business. It pays taxes. People subscribe and pay. 

Legal businesses have the right to advertise whether or not I personally agree with their mandate.  And here is why:

If people are inclined to cheat on their partners, they don't really need pushing over the edge. It will happen, because they want it to happen and no advertising telling them to do it, or telling them not to do it will change that.

Guilt doesn't work.  Reasoning doesn't work.  Encouraging doesn't work.  All Ashley Madison et al does is provide another venue for jerks to legally behave like jerks. People will do what they do, and what they've always done.  I don't have to like it, but I'm not the boss of everyone, am I? I also don't like sports, but I'm not trying to ban sports advertising, and I can justifiably say that sports makes people behave like jerks sometimes.  The point is valid. 

It's dangerous to tell businesses they can't advertise based on moral grounds.  Cheating doesn't directly link to heart disease, obesity, cancer.. (that I'm aware of?  Being hurt is difficult, it's hard to see your family hurting, but it's better to get these kinds of things over with in my experience).  It's just an icky thing to do and anyone who claims to have been swayed to hurt the ones they love by a billboard were going to do it anyway.  That doesn't mean the business can't advertise their services. 

If a business can legally operate, they should legally be allowed to advertise, lest these rules based on perceived morality spill over into other areas of scrutinized principals—  because what's good for the goose is good for the gander, so to speak.  

I like my freedom, and if that means there will have to be be jerks sprinkled around, I'll still take it. 

Blog #7: Should we ban outdoor advertsing?

I went to a local Remembrance Day ceremony on Wednesday.  It was solemn, lovely.  My son’s choir sang. I watched as wreathes were laid to honour the dead.  Or were they? 

Lowes…
The Royal Bank…

No mention of any soldiers, no commemoration of bereaved parents or heroes.

Bank of Montreal…
ReMax…

I won’t mention any of the smaller businesses, at least they are local and maybe tied to the small ceremony in some ways.  Mom & Pops are people. But I couldn’t help but feel like I was at a corporate parade.  It felt like people were laying wreaths in order to advertise themselves.  No mention of who they were honouring or why. 

The kids’ choir stood patiently waiting for the list of names to be rattled off like it was a sports sponsorship appreciation gala so they could sing what they'd practiced. These box store names didn’t mean anything to them. They didn’t mean really anything to me. On some level, maybe they even tie these corporations with the Wars that have happened in their young minds who can't know yet what it all means. Some weird subconscious level… But wreath after wreath was placed.  For companies.  For businesses.  It felt like it was for nobody. It felt like it was putting the meaning of the day aside.

I’ve never seen this before, or didn’t I notice?  I go every year. I haven't noticed.

When did advertising like this become acceptable?  Is it because we’re so used to being bombarded with ads, and name dropping, and corporate sponsorship that it has become so normal that we will flock to a Santa Claus parade that has become little more than big business shoving its way in in disguise?

It really bothered me.  It really bothered me that the wreaths were laid for nobody.

Will banning outdoor advertisements make this kind of behaviour more common? Ads are important, but need to be relegated to appropriate locations. I say this because I like the manipulation game in advertising. I really like it. My brain goes to dark places.  What if we placed the ad inside the coffin?  It could cut down on funeral expenses for families.  My brain went there.  I banished the thought, but other people might not. Would not. Haven’t.  People who stand to make money or improve their public image might not.  Always in the name of progress.  Always in the name of good(?).

Our ideas sometimes come from sinister places, and we by nature push every limit past its breaking point.  Then we set a new breaking point to aim for and break.  It can be a really great thing, and it can be destructive and disturbing. 

So banning outright, no.  I don’t think so.  I think there are interesting places to advertise.  Murals, beautiful things.  Posts filled with decades of staples and art, inviting us to this or that.  Billboards on long boring drives. Motion graphics that someone made, toiling over typography and easing and copyright law, and brand guides.   It’s a cacophony of ideas and opportunities that say look at us, look at what we can do for you. It's a beautiful mess.

But when these things start to intrude on the sacred places, maybe it’s time to halt and reexamine our humanity.

Blog #6 Making Memes

See what I did there?  'Cuz I'm 300 years old by the standards of my classmates.  That's why it's funny, Readers.

It's fair though, I got pretty excited this week when I visited a new cinema to watch a movie about a man with dementia, and pretty much couldn't get over how wonderful it was that the theatre had rocking seats.  In the actual theatre.  My knees didn't even creak.  It's my new go-to theatre for when I run out of puzzles or there are no Peter Falk movies-of-the-week to watch. 

Did you know that they cancelled Murder She Wrote?  Also, Christopher Plummer is the original John Hamm and nobody can tell me it isn't true.

What.

Shake Your Lemons. Blog #5

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.

Shake your Lemons. Take it to the bank.

Because look what you could get.

It's Just a Booty Call to Action, Baby. GET IT? Eh, CONSUMER? Booty CALL TO ACTION?!? *wink wink nudge nudge*

Do we need humour in Advertising?  Uh... yeah.

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.