The strange world of tv advertising
by Mike Crowl
| Doesn’t it strike you that the some people who produce television
ads have a strange view of the world?
Take that dressed-as-an-executive woman with the matronising attitude who raises her eyebrows to the heavens when her husband is heard off-stage calling that he can’t find the car keys, or one of the children says she can’t find the shampoo. The mother tells the washing machine she’s glad someone round the house knows what it’s doing. Hmm, this executive talks to a washing machine. But note, she doesn’t say she knows what she’s doing. Only the washing machine has any clues in this household. The message I get out of this ad is that someone of this ilk wouldn’t be in the laundry anyway, so how come she and the machine are on speaking terms? I suspect she’s hiding out there because she doesn’t know where she put her purse and she’s hoping no one’s noticed. On another front, there are those four slobs, one of them doing knitting while waiting for the scones to cook. The idea in the ad men’s mind that people would sit around mooning and dreaming because they don’t have Sky is a little odd. The quartet of dead-beats shown here is apparently the Sky promoters’ idea of what customers are like before they get Sky. The reality is that once you get Sky you’ll be obliged to sit watching it day and night to justify paying the large sums of money it costs (don’t be fooled by the first free month’s installation). And then you’ll look like these hoboes. Except you won’t have time to cook the scones. The bamboozlement of trying to watch all the sport channels’ outpourings, all the movies and all the news, will soon give you a masters in couch-potato-ism, if not a PhD. Then there’s the way fathers are presented in tv ads, as idiots, drunkards, boys in men’s clothing, and beings less capable than their own children of playing any game that requires intelligence. (The Meadowlea ads are one of the few series that actually show fathers being fathers and being appreciated for it – hats off to the advertising man who dreamed up those!) And that’s just fathers. Men are also shown as hoons incapable of driving a car at a decent speed. These drivers race round corners on all four wheels, zoom along open roads at speeds far in excess of the speed limit – and yes, we know this is a ‘controlled road test’ – or whoosh up to the edge of cliffs and stop within spitting distance of the drop. All this is the normal driving pattern of the tv male. And when men aren’t driving they’re shown as husbands or boyfriends who can’t lift a dishcloth, let alone find where the dishwasher is. The only husband who handles a dishcloth with ease ponces around the house with his wife, (the glamorous one who spent the day in the hairdressers and who probably had to ask her husband where the cleaning equipment is kept) giving us little tips on how to clean a variety of common areas. According to him, half a potato will keep the mist off the inside of your car windscreen, for instance. Have you tried this? All these ads, and many more, are supposed to be selling us something. Hands up if you can tell me which insurance company presents the little saga about the boy hopping into the bathroom only to discover it’s his mother-in-law in the shower, not his wife? Write it on the back of an envelope, with your name and address, and send it off to the company in question. They’ll be most interested. |
This column first appeared on Society and Culture section of www.soapbox.co.nz on 14th May 2001
© Mike Crowl 2001