The Ads That Hate The Most
We’re all familiar with the main types of advertising but probably don’t hold them in the forefronts of our minds. They are television, radio, website ads, celebrity/influencer endorsement, paper ads and billboards. Online advertising is the most complex and effective system as they use our preferences and actions to predict what and how we should be advertised. In terms of sophistication they far outstrip the potential of the static advertisement – how can it compete with a medium that predicts human behaviour
The static billboard cannot compete. Therefore, static billboard ads have tried to stretch the capacity of their old-style delivery method. Influenced by the capabilities of online ads, they have tried to evolve the depth of their messaging. The result is a bizarre outcome that seems to manifest their own frustration with the limitations of the advert as hatred for the intended target, the consumer.
British Heart Foundation’s billboard campaign attempted to break out of its inanimate frame to deliver some “personal” home truths to commuters. The ad tries to create the illusion of the advert being cancelled – this is an anti-advert. It is instead using the space of the advert, the billboard, to talk about something more important than consumerism. This is life or death.
Apart from being mean, the advert is also psychotic. It is emblematic of a desperate medium that has been reduced in potency. The messaging is aware of its limitations, burdened by the ability of online messaging, to speak directly to “you”. In trying to be what it can never be, the veil we already know exists slips, and consumerism overtly shows one of its true faces.
It is not a coincidence that this advert was for a charity. By taking a not-for-profit organisation into the realm of consumer-capitalist language is fertile space for the aggressive nature of advertising. Emboldened by the righteousness of its cause, the advertisement can use all the tricks and do something extra special to deliver “meaningful” content. In this instance, the passive-aggressive conceit that most advertisements act under was lifted in favour of a hostile approach.
The advert produces a false equivalence between its hostility and the importance of what is at stake. The advert says “There is no time for niceties, there is no time to produce an advert. What we have to say is more than the advert, this is an emergency. We interrupt your sleepwalk to work to give you this public safety announcement.”
The ad communicates a resentfulness of having to talk to us. Their point is that we need them – not the other way around. And yet, it is asking us for something. Maybe that is why the advert feels the need to tell you that you might die. In that moment the British Heart Foundation’s campaign serves as a metaphor for all of consumerism, all of advertising.
It is a surprise that a charity got the chance to say what every advert wishes it could say but should never say. If you don’t spend money with us, you might die. It is the ultimate incentive, to destabilise the thing you value most, your life, and to offer you a symbolic action to alleviate that fear. In this case donating to a charitable cause.
It poignantly captures a reversal in psychology that is much closer to the truth, the advert needs us and not the other way around. Yet so often they talk to us like we need them. Of course, we know this about ads. So, if we know about consumerism’s subversive nature, why has it not become extinct?
Perhaps it highlights the need for an artful way of saying things in order to find actionable pieces of information. It’s as if there is a code of language needed to make accessible what we already know. What we see in the British Heart Foundation ad is consumerism unintentionally acting against its own interests, like a snake eating its own tail. The adverts text is more confessional than anything else.
When Mark Fisher described consumer capitalism as a “monstrous, infinitely plastic entity capable of metabolising and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact”. In relation to Fisher’s definition, this advert wants to metabolise your sense of peace, wellbeing at any cost. It is worth stressing that this advert exists as no more than a symbol for the deeply rooted values of consumer capitalism.
The biggest myth of consumerism is that buyer consumes the product – when in actual fact, the product consumes something of the buyer, always. Through taking financial capital, commodifying the self, or psychologically destabilising someone’s being, consumer capitalism always attempts to metabolise something of the individual.
This absurdity of the BHF’s premise can be best understood if you imagine who might be most affected by the advert. Imagine if someone with heart disease did read the advert. As the advert reached its apex – the viewer remembers the anxiety she felt when she had a heart attack in public. Her pulse rises. Her body tenses. Adrenaline levels rise… And what for?
Adverts are praised for producing emotional reactions. The over-exposure to consumer values has produced a passivity to the hostile and invasive nature of advertising. We are so au fait with the perceived values of consumer capitalism that we don’t find it unusual that advertising permeates every sphere of life, even who we are and how we assimilate ourselves into society.
When the banality of consumerism bends into the surreal, we imagine the content of an advertisement: The brash imagery or punchy messaging, that produces an emotional response inside of us. When more surreal, and more dystopian, is our blindness to the surreality of our daily relationship to advertising. Second only, to our willingness to have aspects of ourselves continually consumed in a ritualistic exchange that, in relation to what is lost, counts for nothing.