Things that have happened

Advertising is great. Sometimes.

My friend John asks the question:

Advertising is designed to affect the behaviour of people for the benefit of the advertiser. Why would anyone willingly expose themselves to something designed to steal their attention?

To which I answer “because it’s good” (sometimes).

But I think that needs some qualification.

Many geeks are control-freaks and don’t like the fact that advertising is not only supposed to mess with your head, but actually, demonstrably, does mess with your head. This is deeply unsettling to the sort of person who likes to have total control over large parts of their lives.

Advertising, like architecture or graphic design, also sits in that space somewhere between art and science. There are hypotheses you can test and repeatable experiments that you can conduct to support those hypotheses. But it’s also a little bit mystical and depends upon a human factor that is somewhat inscrutable (or at least we hope it is - “never let daylight in on the magic” as I often say). This makes many people very uncomfortable; are we reducing the fantastic possibilities of the human mind to simple number-crunchers?

There’s also an intrusive aspect to advertising. As John says, advertising is pollution. I find Spotify quite annoying because the adverts get in the way. I rarely listen to commercial radio any more because of the adverts. But I still know the phone number to the Nottingham Evening Post’s classified adverts (elephant, double elephant, half an elephant twice - 482 482) because of an advert starring Richard Briers and Penelope Wilton that ran on Trent FM during the mid-eighties.

TV advertising is different. On the whole I quite like it. This is because of a series of adverts that I think are both functional (they have increased sales) but are also fantastic short films.

Some of my favourites:

Levi’s Spaceman. We had this on video and used to watch just the ad over and over again. It was spoilt by the fact that the Babylon Zoo track featured actually sounds nothing like the Arthur Baker remix used in the advert.

Carling Black Label. These consistently made me laugh out loud (although this one is a piss-take of yet another Levi’s ad).

Guiness Surfers. Featuring the awesome “Phat Planet” by Leftfield. Guiness were another company that had consistently good adverts during the 80s and 90s.

Apple iPod The only series of adverts that I can think of that have been consistent throughout the 21st Century.

Audi Q5. This is one of my then-four year old daughter’s favourites.

However, there’s something to note here. All of these work really well as short films. The art side of the equation is as important (arguably more important) than the science side.

Which is why it’s noticeable that there’s only a single series from the 21st Century in the list. I’m not sure of the economics, but I would hazard that all of those adverts featured above were expensive. And I think that people noticed that the functional side of advertising (getting the sales) was possible without the art side (making something people want to watch).

Advertising on the web takes this further. Even if we ignore 37 Signals’ statement that adding advertising to your pages throws your priorities (what matters the most - the content or the revenue-generating advert?), web-based advertising offers us a raft of statistics and measurements that just aren’t possible with analogue adverts.

And programmes like Google Adwords not only make advertising cheap and simple for vendors but they quite deliberately remove all the art from advertising. Your adverts are nothing more than a sequence of characters; unless you’re great at haiku, there is little room for artistry there.

The unfortunate consequence of this is that we reduce human desire (which whether you are in to material consumption or not, is a wonderful thing) to a series of A/B tests. And the daylight overpowers the magic.

The weird thing about Spotify

I use iTunes differently to Spotify.

For a start, if I really like a song I’ll buy it and place it in iTunes. That way it’s on my phone and my iPod (which means I can listen in the car). I know Spotify has an iPhone app but I can’t connect my phone to my car so I use an old iPod for that.

But because Spotify is more “transient” than iTunes, I spent a lot of time setting up smart playlists and the like in iTunes. It’s my stuff and I want it exactly how I want it. With Spotify I don’t have that investment (and there’s no point in me buying Spotify Premium because I tend to listen to about ten songs intensively till I’m sick of them - not thousands of songs, which would make it worthwhile). So I don’t set up playlists in Spotify.

Which leads to an unusual side-effect. I know have started listening to albums again. Choose an artists and set Spotify playing through the album in the order intended. Something I’d not done for years.