The latest Microsoft adverts for Windows 7 are really annoying me. They are trying to make out that I, we you helped invent it by making suggesting and that it makes us all more powerful – rather than just more reliant on their monolithic technology. Here is a flavour of a poster I saw on the the tube:
“I asked for fewer clicks. Now it takes fewer clicks
I’ve never been more influential”
Aaaaargh. No you have never been more duped into splashing out on an upgrade for feature you don’t understand and will never use. And why am I pretending you even exist. You don’t. You are just an imaginary person made up by the MS advertising company. This is all part of the new technique to make us think we co-produced the product and will therefore have more affinity to it. Very clever.
And another thing. I object to adverts on the tube. Why should I have to look at commercial posters if I don’t want to. Our cities and public transport should be free of this rubbish. More on this from Compass soon!
I lived in Liverpool for a couple of years in the mid-80s. They have a very small tube system there, but it looks like the London Underground. There was almost no advertising there at the time because everyone was unemployed, and if you weren’t, the chances were that you were coming into work by car from a nice area. Consequently, there was little point in advertisers paying to talk to the poor by advertising in the Liverpool tube.
Well, it was a sad and uncolourful place without any decent advertising to read while you waited for a train (not worth getting out the War and Peace for such a short wait or train journey). In fact it was miserable. So no, I don’t object to adverts on the tube. The best ones are quite entertaining. I don’t object to advertising. I object to poor, crass advertising. I don’t want to live in a planned state with only one sort of cheese.
Re tube advertising: I imagine it brings in substantial revenue for London Transport, which should be keeping fares down. That will be the theory in any case. It would be interesting to note what the fares would be on a tube with no advertising.
Ditto the price of your newspaper, magazine, TV channel, website – pretty much any media. Only the price of your road would probably be unaffected if hoardings were taken down – and that is something I could quite easily live with.
we could have poetry, great art etc – it doesnt have to be dull just becasue its not commecial. Most of the tube was built by the Victorians – they didnt have adverts to pay for it. They knew it was important. Lets have GPs, hospitals and schools full of adverts on that basis Alex
Neil, you are making the same error so many marketers make (I know. I am one). You are assuming that the population is cultured like you or me and wants to read poetry. It doesn’t. It wants to buy things and watch Big Brother. It’s very sad, but panem et circenses has been what the masses have always wanted, from Tyburn lynchings to reality TV.
Until the Green movement comes up with making eology fun, exciting and sexy, headway will be slow.
As for the Victorians (and I wrote about them on Gliddofglood.com in this respect) granted they had civic vision, but it was being bankrolled by Empire: they didn’t need mass advertising (which in any case had barely been invented) to pay for it.