Welcome to Adverhetoric!
If you’ve seen Mad Men, you might picture the advertising world as a place full of slick and smart businessmen – and I’m not denying that that doesn’t exist anywhere in advertising, I won’t deprive you of that fantasy – but I think that the reality is that so many people involved in the industry do a lot of guesswork when it comes to humour and persuasion. Somebody needs to slap them, quickly, before they make me switch my allegiance from TV to Megavideo, where I’ll be caught in an endless cycle of watching shows for seventy-two minutes at a time followed by disappointing periods of staring into my fridge.
It might just be me, or are ads actually getting slightly worse and more annoying every year? Although there are some brilliant ads out there, most of what’s churned out by the media is, quite simply, shit. Now I don’t want to make any sweeping generalisations, because some ads are just so damn good that they’re able to deservedly attach new meanings to the brands they represent; I mean, it’s no coincidence that a lot of brands that you like have released a lot of ads that you enjoyed as well. These rare, decent ads make their constant interruptions slightly more bearable, while the rest of the bunch sometimes force me to switch over to some disgusting and tasteless channels, like MTV Hits.
Let’s be realistic – ads aren’t going to disappear overnight, they’re a massive part of media revenue, and they’re everywhere: TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, billboards, bus stops, and way more. But it’s about time we point a finger in the face of bad ads and assertively say, “NO…stop it”. Maybe one person will notice, maybe nobody will. Either way, I need a place to vent my sarcasm. And that’s pretty much what I’ll do on this site. I’ll give credit where it’s due, while scorning the ads that fail to reach my unreasonably high standards. I will (not) do this in a completely fair and unbiased manner, and along the way I’ll also tell you what’s been going on inside the minds of these advertisers. Who knows, I might even throw in some extra tips on persuasion here and there, because that shit is important.
