Advertising Culture

I always said that I didn’t want to make this a weekly blog. That’s lucky seeing as it’s been around 2 weeks now. Basically what happened is that Easter got in the way. What I mean by this is that a trip to Cambridge, 1kg of Thornton’s chocolate and an episode with a national trust volunteer old lady got in the way. As usual, ideas haven’t been flowing freely either so I could bang on about how I was unjustly told off for touching a table in the national trust – about how when walking around the house at Hinton Ampner with the family on Easter Monday, we were told to look out for rabbits in the house as part of the Easter activities. I came across what I thought looked a bit like a rabbit pretending to be a duck. You might almost suspect this rabbit was only pretending to be a duck to try and throw you off the scent. No sweat though, I was able to remove the beak and reveal the crafty rabbit’s identity.

Trouble was though, in doing this I ended up touching the table and the nearest national trust volunteer old lady (NTVOL from now on..) scurried over to apprehend the threat of my hand (reminded me somewhat of the Ashurst lady at college – you know the one upstairs that shouts at the top of her voice about how silent it is up there? Yep, that one. Filling in the survey that they sent round about Ashurst was good fun.. Should be any day now that I find out if I’ve won the chocolates or not). As we walked round the rest of the building, each and every other rabbit I saw was staring at me, mockingly loving the fact that I was now under surveillance and therefore unable to expose anymore of them.

But I won’t bang on about that. Instead, I was going to bang on about adverts and promotions that companies come up with to presumably, sell you stuff. As a bit of background, people have told me I should go into something like marketing or advertising. After all, I got an A for Media GCSE (contrary to popular belief, you do have to do more than just turn up and write your name and candidate number at the top of the exam paper. There was a little bit of colouring in there as well I think) and I used to be forever quoting adverts. Personal favourites; the Meerkats (to be fair though, who wasn’t quoting those Lads) and the Monkey from PG tips. The thing is though, I hate adverts. I’ve got ‘AdBlock’ installed on Chrome, and a personal pet hate of mine is the feeling you get when an advert’s worked. I hate it when you realise an advert’s got you and you sign up to the website, you buy the product or more commonly in my case, you visit their fast food restaurant. Someone’s clever promotional campaign has prompted you to part with cash. Cash that will no doubt go to theirs and the company’s back pocket and therefore the government and the economy (which needs Balls by the way..). Actually, before any clever dick points out, I’m fully aware that the money was in the economy already. I’ll level with you, I just wanted to shamelessly plug/advertise a previous blog post. There. I’m a Hypocrite.

This all struck me the other day when we were walking into town to get food (not being 18, I don’t have much other use for town) and we had the usual debate – KFC or McDonalds. We were all up for KFC and if I’m brutally honest, I think I prefer it. The ‘Supercharger’ burger with the hot sauce makes for a pretty sweet (well savoury I guess) meal/snack (have actually ended up buying 2 before). If you’re as clued up as we were about McDonalds’ cuisine, you’d have known as well that they were running their Monopoly promotion. As we were approaching KFC, I remembered this. I can remember thinking to myself, “if it’s a choice between KFC or McDonalds with the Monopoly promotion, what would you most like to get in an instant win?” So in the end, as a result of McDonalds’ clever marketing, promotional campaign, we found ourselves sitting in McDonalds feeling disappointed and somewhat conned that all we seemed to have won were multiple copies of Fenchurch station. One quarter of the way to an Xbox Kinect. I think you’ll agree that the only winner there, was Don Thompson…