Advertising

What strikes me is the similarity between mass spamming, which is apparently not supported by governments and councils, and public advertising, which is not only endorsed by but generates large amounts of revenue for our political currently-non-lizard-only-in-appearance overlords.

Every time we walk around our town centres we see dozens of thirty foot long advertisements on the sides of streets and buildings. Business 'parks' and retail [discharge] outlets encloak themselves in this revenue-generating sh1t and, not content with covering our countryside with motorways, some cnut comes along and parks an advert-smeared artic alongside them too lest those driving might at least enjoy looking at the countryside their motorway has ruined (the motorways should be underground, costly at first just like the original motorway but cheap enough once the DfT has paid for a couple of TBMs and learned the techniques).

Adverts are garish, have weak jokes and puns (but seriously, the lowest common denominator can't be THAT low?) and seem to me to obscure some of the nicest things - classic architecture, trees and plants and stuff; i'd rather see a pile of rubble than three adverts for three different banks' identical rip-off cabal-price-matched five-points-below savings account, or BT rubbing my face in the fact that they supply millions of people with a service that would make shannon weep.

They're on buses, they're on street furniture, they're even free-standing in little metal cases in the middle of the pavement. The councils local to me have for some years been allowing businesses to put permanent metal adverts on roundabouts and sponsoring road signs. They're using screens now too, with speakers. $DEITY preserve me! I have successfully avoided television for years and now I'm forced to endure them in public?

The ones outside my work you actually have to walk around, and they're totally legit: more o'ferrall and their competitors are raking in huge amounts of cash for something which is, my ranting aside, little more than an annoyance, just like mr spam king. Compared to them, mr spam king is smalltime.

Spam: hated by end-users and infrastructure providers, not even really liked by legitimate businesses despite being a very effective in-your-face marketing technique (presumably because of the resulting opprobrium).

Billboards: i don't know anyone else who seems to object to them, yet I know nobody who actually likes them. They're a part of life, but imagine how much nicer it would be without them. They make our cities look cheap, cost the businesses involved huge amounts in marketing budgets, which increases the cost of the product, and for what? so that the big names in a given sector stay the big names, while treading water relative to each other. The smart consumer pays them no heed anyway, seeking out the genuinely congruent product on teh interweb.

As a smoker I'm not too bothered that my ability to smoke in public places is about to be curtailed, as it is unpleasant for non-smokers and is generally a bad thing to be discouraged, so when do we get *this* public nuisance removed?

I bet some of you can see adverts right now, out of your window or perhaps even inside your workplace (hmmm, adblock for my own eyes...? now there's a technoology i'll never get funding to develop).

Let's all take a few moments to imagine how pretty our towns and cities would look with no advertising at all. Go on, do it now. It's wonderful innit? NOT going to happen. Bad luck.

Soz for hijacking the comments with my rant, although it's blatantly what you all read the comments for : - ) I'm not a mailbombing fringe-lunatic really, just a normal guy who feels that turning corporations into collectives would solve a lot of the world's problems. Woo and yay for hippies and beards.