ADVERTISEMENT 1 – In the late 1970s, when British Airways started flying Concorde, they ran a full-page magazine ad showing a plate on a table containing a red fish, an onion, a piece of broccoli and a carrot, along with knife and fork. The caption read: At Mach 2, We Don’t Serve Fast Food.
Advertisement 2 – On my first visit to Panama in 1962, our group of Caribbean journalists visited an oil refinery in Colon to find a massive billboard near the gate advertising cigarettes, of all things. It read: No Smoking . . . Not Even Camels!
Advertisement 3 – Just four consecutive frames on the television screen: frame one: a roll of toilet paper on the wall, dissolving after five seconds into frame two: same roll of toilet paper dissolving after five seconds into frame three: a bottle of Phillips Milk Of Magnesia dissolving into the fourth and final frame with toilet paper rolling, rolling, rolling – no music, no voice, no caption, no hands on the toilet paper.
Memory of those powerful images came back recently when a friend called. He was angry and frustrated.
“Carl,” he roared, “can anything be done about advertising on CBC Television?”
I asked him to explain.
“The noise level, man; the noise level!” he came back.
With a dash of hyperbole, he complained: “I’m wearing out remote after remote and changing batteries all the time. When ads come on, up goes the volume and I have to rush for the remote to lower the volume; when they stop, down goes the volume . . . and I have to reach for the remote and turn up the volume again. It’s driving me up the wall, man!”
I sympathized and recalled 15 years ago when, as chairman of the Barbados Broadcasting Authority, I asked a friend in advertising about it. He explained it away, not very persuasively, by telling me that it got the attention of the listener. Empirical evidence and analysis supported it, he stressed.
I failed to impress on him that if the listener or viewer was annoyed, the message would hardly have the intended effect; in fact, it would annoy the listener, causing her to tune out. The jarring annoyance continues every day on radio and television.
Interestingly, I don’t notice similar fluctuating imbalance on the satellite channels beamed from North America and elsewhere. The sound level of the dialogue or continuity broadcasting should not be at such stark variance with the intruding advertisements or promotional messages. So why do we allow it here?
Is it because we love noise?
As I commiserated with my friend, the three ads just mentioned rushed back and I shared my own disappointment with the general inadequacy of local advertising – not only on television, but all across the communications media. There’s so little that can be considered original; so little of what Vic Fernandes terms “creative genius”; so little humour.
Someone is always shouting at me, bullying me to buy some product, to install a service or to attend a fete. The ad that takes the cake invites me “to listen to my favourite music faster”.
I’ve finally worked out a way to do that: I will resurrect my old Technics SL-1200 turntable and play my scratchy old 33 1/3 long-playing vinyl records at 78 rpm.
We hear the same boring messages all day long – messages like Voice Of Barbados’ self-serving promo with a woman praising the station and The Nation for “saving Barbados from the Dark Ages”. Give it a rest, Mr Babb!
I might be expecting too much in a society that, despite its many firsts and superlatives, cannot honestly count a sense of humour among those virtues.
I yearn to see or hear ads that evoke a smile – ads that show a little creative effort in their production.
Advertising elsewhere is so funny and entertaining; but then, people elsewhere don’t pay good money for such mediocrity.
• Carl Moore was the first Editor of THE NATION and is a social commentator. Email [email protected]
