Sunday, 12 August 2012

Advertising, or weather forecasts?

One or the other is going to kill us.  Don’t take my word for it, look at them.  I had to, yesterday evening, because I needed to see a weather forecast – well, that’s not true, obviously, but I wanted to – but I’d missed the local news and so had to sit through several minutes of ads before the national. 

Well!  Talk about riding the crest of the national wave!  The first one featured about twelve vehicles crashing destructively into each other, ranging from quad bikes through family cars, via HGV artics and family coaches up to, as far as I can remember, space shuttles – at the end of which it turns out that nobody gets hurt, we all crawl out smiling from the wreckage and everyone gets to buy a cheap tacky little family saloon or something.

The next one was about a singing car insurance salesman who has belatedly realised that his best career move is to organise his own suicide, by rocket launcher, in order to protect the human race from any more adverts for the product he’s trying to sell.  Which isn’t even car insurance, it turns out.

I can’t really remember the third one.  I think it may have been to do with how to protect myself from vaginal thrush, or maybe where to buy a snotgreen sofa for half price, I forget.  All I remember is plastic smiles from Stepford wives.

The weather forecast was pretty equivocal, once I got to it.  It’s understandable.  After all, we don’t want the economy collapsing around our ears because nobody believes predictions, or adverts, any more, do we?

7 comments:

  1. I'm probably one of the few people on the planet who is actually amused by the 'he's only a Tenor' singing car insurance ads. I'm getting bored with the talking rodents though.

    We don't watch a tremendous amount of commercial television so when we do, we really notice the adverts. The lesser digital channels are the worst; they seem to have a stock of only about 6 different ads and if you watch for a whole hour you get to see all of them at least twice.

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  2. When I watch commercial TV, it's always a recording I made earlier. Oh, the joy of fast forwarding through those crass adverts.

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  3. Fast forwarding can be risky though.
    I prefer to miss stuff than watch ads, even in fast forward mode.
    Best way to get the weather forecast is to record it & watch it the next day. If you're near the window you can even do a critical appraisal as you watch.

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  4. I look up several weather forecasts on my phone and choose the one that suits me best.

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  5. Every now and then we try to guess what's being advertised before they tell us. Even with the sound on it's sometimes impossible.

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  7. My underlying thoughts behind this post were - has anyone ever bought something because of an advert? And, has a prediction (weather or otherwise) ever proved completely accurate (and does anyone ever check this)? And finally, given that the entire global economy now consists entirely of adverts and predictions, are we doomed?

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