Killvertising [16 June 2008]
Pity ITV. No really – drop to your knees and pity it. Last week the culture secretary Andy Burnham refused to accept a European Union directive that would have paved the way for product placement on British television. On hearing the news, ITV’s face fell. Its shares soon followed suit.
As advertising revenue continues to dwindle, money is leaking from ITV’s business model like blood from a harpooned steak. Cutbacks will be inevitable, and chances are we’ll see the results on screen. Forget dumbing-down; fear cheapening-up. Instead of a star-studded Doctor Who knock-off stuffed with pricey CGI dinosaurs, the next series of Primeval will be a reality show in which Patrick Kielty and Lembit Opik drive around Staines in an ice-cream van trying to catch dogs in a net. Loose Women will become Loose Woman, a daytime talk show in which a menopausal fishwife stands alone in a cupboard-sized studio, staring into a mirror and gossiping about herself. And in a bid to cut down on location fees, from now on the detectives in Lewis will be solving murders that have taken place in their imaginations; each episode will consist of nothing but footage of Lawrence Fox and Kevin Whately sitting in chairs screwing their eyes up and frowning a bit.
Boo hoo hoo. Bad news for telly.
On the face of it, Burnham’s reasons for rejecting product placement couldn’t be more sound. Trust in television is already at an all-time low following last year’s string of call-in scandals, when viewers were effectively pickpocketed by the box in the corner of their living room. Many people now stare at their TV set for hours not because they like the programmes it shows, but because they’re worried it might start nicking stuff while their back’s turned. And Burnham recognises that blurring the line between shows and ads won’t exactly help matters. ‘Product placement exacerbates this decline in trust and contaminates our programmes,’ he said. ‘As a viewer I don’t want to feel the script has been written by the commercial marketing director.’
He’s got a point there, although it might be worth giving the commercial marketing director a go – just once, in the spirit of fairness – to see what he comes up with. Love in the Time of the Arrow Information Paradox? The New Adventures of Spreadsheet, PI? Brand Awareness Way? OK, so the dialogue might be impenetrable, but it couldn’t possibly be as boring as the latest Poliakoff exercise in mastur-guff.
Anyway, Burnham’s right. But the world is wrong. ITV’s got to pay for its programmes somehow and, in the current environment, prohibiting product placement altogether seems a bit like telling a bunch of starving plane crash survivors shivering in a lifeboat that they’re not allowed to start eating corpses for sustenance. No one wants to switch on the box and see Fireman Sam banging on about the great taste of Disprin, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
One solution is to allow product placement after all, provided it’s subtle, and provided the advertisers have no say in the editorial content. Lingering pack shots, or dialogue such as, ‘Taggart, according to an animated multimedia text I’ve just received on my new Sony Ericcson t85X, there’s been a murder’ are out, obviously. But I for one couldn’t give a toss if Doc Martin is shown spreading Marmite – proper, branded Marmite – on his toast. Actually, I don’t care if he spreads it on his balls, because I don’t watch Doc Martin, but you get the point – if Marmite wants to pay to stock his onscreen kitchen, and that makes the show cheaper, which in turn means fewer ad breaks in the middle of it, therefore allowing me to spend more time wallowing in a world of uninterrupted fiction, then I’m happy. Well, OK, not happy – never happy – but not much closer to suicide either. That’s a plus.
Another option is to advertise in new and exciting ways. A few weeks ago Honda ran a live skydiving commercial. Why stop there? Why not stage your own advertorial Olympics consisting solely of 30-second sponsored events broadcast live across the globe? (Nanoseconds after typing this I’ve realised it’s a brilliant idea, so any ad agencies reading this should consider it copyrighted by me as of now. Use it if you like, but it’ll cost you – give my slice of the royalties to Amnesty International, just to annoy the Chinese.)
Or turn hardcore. Let’s say you’re trying to launch a new soft drink. Traditionally you’d have to spend millions on a commercial, and millions more booking airtime for it. Screw that. Here’s what you do: put up one billboard. Just one. Somewhere on a route near Buckingham Palace or Downing Street. Point a camera at it 24/7. Then simply pay a sniper to assassinate someone of global importance when they pass in front of it. Bingo! The clip will run on an endless loop on every news channel in the world, for eternity. Even as viewers gasp in horror watching the victim’s head explode like a watermelon, they’ll simultaneously be thinking ‘What’s that? New Plum-Flavoured Pepsi? Cool!’ each time a chunk of skull flies past your logo.
Talk about brand awareness. That’s the future, right there. All it needs is its own twatty marketing-speak buzzterm – something like ‘Killvertising’ or ‘Atroci-publicity’ – and within about six months it’ll even seem halfway acceptable. Go creatives. Go you.
Love and hat [23 June 2008]
Know what I’ve decided to hate this week? Hats. Yes, hats. Who do hats think they are? They contribute nothing to society, and don’t even display basic manners. Has a hat ever held a door open for you? No. It hasn’t.
While the rest of us work our fingers to the bone, sweating litres, trying to keep this crazy world going, hats just lounge around on top of our heads like they own the place. If you’re currently wearing a hat, take it off and stamp on it. Down with hats. All hats are wankers.
And never was there a more sickening display of archetypal hat arrogance than ladies’ day at Royal Ascot, which took place last week. The British press seems to view it as a harmless, tittersome annual tradition-cum-photo opportunity; a playful contest in which an assortment of leathery upper-class crones and willowy swan-necked debutantes compete to see who can wear the silliest piece of headgear.
Every year it’s the same thing: a 200-year-old countess you’ve never heard of, who closely resembles a Cruella De Vil mannequin assembled entirely from heavily wrinkled scrotal tissue that’s been soaked in tea for the past eight decades, attempts to draw attention away from her sagging neck – a droopy curtain of skin that hangs so low she has to repeatedly kick it out of her path as she crosses the royal compound – by balancing the millinery equivalent of Bilbao’s Guggenheim museum on her head, and winds up forming the centrepiece of a light-hearted photomontage in the centre of whatever newspaper you happen to be reading that day, accompanied by a picture of Princess Eugenie in a headdress, and some milky underfed heiress with the physique of a violin-playing mantis, wearing nothing but a diamante cornflake on each nipple and a hat made out of second-hand dentures or something equally avant-garde.
That’s how ladies’ day at Ascot comes across in the papers. Pro-Hattist propaganda, plain and simple. Tee hee hee, look at us hats – aren’t we just marvellous? Isn’t hat-wearing just peachy? Make more hats, make more hats. Come on, humans – make more hats. And we lap it up.
Honestly. It’s stomach-churning.
Still, such hatstravagance pales into minnow-like insignificance compared to some of the hats on display in the Tower of London. I went there somewhat randomly last week, accompanying a friend from out of town. And at first it was fun, playing tourist in my own city. I chortled at a beefeater. Gawped at a bit of old stone. Sniffed a few ravens. As you do.
And then we headed for the jewel house to see all the crowns and shit. We ambled in and immediately found ourselves part of a slow-moving caterpillar of sightseers, which shuffled through the vaults with hushed, painstaking reverence, past immense glass boxes displaying gaudy old tat of mind-mangling financial value.
There were gigantic golden spoons. Gigantic golden soup tureens. Royal gowns apparently woven from angel hair and diamond string. Countless sceptres and orbs. God knows why you’d need one sceptre, let alone a four-metre cabinet full of them, but here they were
regardless, each more gilded and unnecessary than the last. P Diddy would look round the room and laugh at the absurdity. It took the concept of ‘bling’ and pushed it beyond comprehension.
But it was the crowns that did it for me. What are crowns? They’re hats with ideas above their station. Impractical hats at that. They’re cumbersome, fragile, and disappointingly uniform. Most have got bloody great holes in the middle. King Frederick the Great once said, ‘A crown is merely a hat that lets the rain in’, and whoever the hell he was, he sounds like someone who’d know.
The sole purpose of a crown is to make anyone not wearing one feel like an insignificant pauper. They’re obscene to the point of satire. If Donald Trump walked through Manhattan wearing a top hat made of banknotes, we’d call him a crass, tasteless idiot. Yet each year, at the state opening of parliament, the Queen rocks up wearing the Imperial State Crown – a hideous ornamental nest containing almost 3,000 diamonds, 277 pearls, 17 sapphires, 11 emeralds and four rare rubies. Or five rare rubies, depending on which bit of the internet you ask, because it’s encrusted with so many wildly expensive jewels, no one seems entirely sure quite how many there actually are.
One thing’s for certain – the Queen could, if she so chose, open parliament by whipping off the crown and saying: ‘You know what? This is absolutely taking the piss, isn’t it? This hat’s got to be worth at least nine hospitals. And I don’t even need it: there’s loads more of these things back at the Tower. Tell you what, let’s flog this one to a Russian oligarch and use the money for saving lives or researching sustainable energy sources or something.’
She could do that. She’s the Queen. But no. She’d rather sit there balancing a pile of unimaginable riches on her head while we scrabble for beans in the dirt.
This tells you all you need to know about the sort of person who voluntarily elects to wear a hat. And I’m not simply bitter because I’ve got a weird, boxlike head that no hat or cap or woollen beanie can sit comfortably on. No. That’s not the root of it at all.
The graveyard of privacy [7 July 2008]
I’ve got the opening scene of a dystopian thriller all worked out. It’s a hot summer night in a typical suburban flat. A young woman (let’s call her Alison) stands over the body of her boyfriend, who she’s just killed in a fit of madness. A crime of passion. She didn’t mean to do it, but gah – now look at the mess she’s made.
She’s quivering, gazing down at the body like someone staring into a hitherto undiscovered dimension filled with swirling nightmarish tapestries, still clutching the murder weapon in her dismal little fist, breathing through her nose like a cornered church mouse, and somewhere in the background the phone is ringing. Ringing, ringing, ringing. It takes her an age to notice. In a daze she answers it, her eyes still harpooned to the corpse. She presses the receiver to her ear and someone in a call centre greets her by name.
‘Hello Alison,’ says the voice, which – while friendly – sounds as though it’s reading from a card, for the 50,000th time. ‘I’m calling from OmniCorps Ltd, and according to our predictive software there’s a 97.8% chance you’ve just murdered your boyfriend. Now, we’re obligated to pass this information on to the authorities, which means the police are already on their way, but before they arrive we’d like to offer you the opportunity to take advantage of an exciting offer. So if you’d like to go to your window and look outside, our escape van should be arriving any moment …’
Alison parts the curtains: it’s already there, impatiently tooting. ‘Just get in the van,’ says the voice. ‘Get in, and we’ll take care of the rest.’
Still in a trance, she goes downstairs. She gets in. In the back are three other people. All have committed similar crimes within the past hour. Speckled with blood, they stare at each other in crazy silence as the van pulls away.
It turns out that the marketing arm of OmniCorps Ltd has been automatically tracking the entire nation’s internet activity, viewing habits, credit card transactions, use of public transport etc for years, in order to build an exhaustive database of consumer profiles. They’ve become so good at profiling, they’re able to accurately predict whether a given individual will commit a crime, and if so, what time of day they’ll do it. They’re like the ‘Pre-Cog’ department in Minority Report, except that, instead of arresting murderers, they offer them an escape route. But once Alison gets in the van, she’s driven off to a gigantic underground sweatshop, where she and thousands of other murderers are doomed to spend the rest of their lives slaving on a production line, creating bargain-basement products for – you guessed it – OmniCorps Ltd.
That’s the basic idea. It needs work. OmniCorps Ltd needs a better name, obviously. Also the story doesn’t have a second or third act (some sort of prison breakout is in order, I guess). Worst of all, our main protagonist is a murderer, so the average non-murdering audience member might find it hard to empathise with her. Originally, Alison was a man; I made her a woman to sweeten the pill a tad, but maybe her boyfriend needs to have been a serial cheat, or a violent drunk, or at the very least have a taste for plodding indie stadium-rock or something, so we can comfortably forgive her for bashing his skull in with a steak tenderiser or whatever she used.
Anyway, it’d be worth watching, if only because the premise is 23% more plausible now than it was five years ago when I thought of it. Back then, my biggest fear was the mild intrusion of Nectar points. Now I simply assume everything I do is comprehensively probed by the invisible fingers of the central scrutiniser as a matter of course.
In my flat, there’s a full-length balcony window, with no curtains, situated right outside my bedroom. I sleep naked, so if I go for a piss in the middle of the night, I end up flashing the neighbours twice – once on the way to the bathroom, and once on the way back. First time it happened, I vowed to put up an opaque blind. But I haven’t. Partly because after a while I figured, hey, they’ve seen it all before – why deprive them now? But mainly because I live in London, European Graveyard of Privacy.
This place is a joke. Each day I move around carrying a mobile phone (traceable) and an Oyster card (trackable), monitored, on average, by 10 times as many CCTV cameras as there are in the Big Brother house. Wherever I go, a gigantic compound eye peers at the back of my neck. I’m another bustling dot in the ant farm.
Hide indoors? Ha. I’ve got Sky TV. I can’t even draw the curtains and watch Bargain Hunt without some whirring electronic prick making a note of what I’m doing. And forget the internet. Today I blew 20 minutes pointlessly looking up an old kids’ TV show called Animal Kwackers on YouTube. A record of this decision will soon be automatically winging its way to Viacom. I haven’t just wasted my own time; I’ve wasted theirs too. The way things are going, I halfexpect to hear a quiet electric ‘peep’ noise each time I flush the toilet; another bowel movement logged by Bumland Security.
But I don’t get angry. I shrug. They won. They won years ago. Like a bear in a zoo, I can rub my head against the wall in despair, or ignore the onlookers and forlornly shuffle around as normal. Past that balcony window. Where each time they get an eyeful, an electric peep sounds somewhere in the dark.
Yeah. Never mind a boot stamping on a human face forever. A smug electric peep each time they catch sight of your bumhole. That’s your future, right there.
Naked emperors of Pluto [14 July 2008]
I’ve got a theory – an untested, unprovable theory – that the more interesting your life is at any given point, the less lurid and spectacular your dreams will be. Think of it as a balancing procedure carried out by the brain to stop you getting bored to death.
If your waking life is mundane, it’ll inject some thrills into your night-time imaginings to maintain a healthy overall fun quotient. So if you work in a cardboard box factory, and your job is to stare at the side of each box as it passes along a conveyor belt, to ensure they’re all uniform and boxy enough – and you do this all day, every day, until your mind grows so dissociated and numb you can sca
rcely tell where the cardboard ends and your body begins – when your daily routine is THAT dull, chances are you’ll spend each night dreaming you’re the Emperor of Pluto, wrestling a 6-foot green jaguar during a meteor storm in the desert just outside Vegas.
All well and good in the world of dreams. But if you continue to believe you’re the Emperor of Pluto after you’ve woken up, and you go into work and start knocking the boxes around with a homemade sceptre while screaming about your birthright, you’re in trouble.
I mention this because recently I’ve found myself bumping into people – intelligent, level-headed people – who are sincerely prepared to entertain the notion that there might be something in some of the less lurid 9/11 conspiracy theories doing the rounds. They mumble about the ‘controlled demolition’ of WTC 7 (oft referred to as ‘the third tower’), or posit the notion that the Bush administration knew 9/11 was coming and let it happen anyway. I mean, you never know, right? Right? And did I tell you I’m the Emperor of Pluto?
The glaring problem – and it’s glaring in 6,000 watt neon, so vivid and intense you can see it from space with your eyes glued shut – with any 9/11 conspiracy theory you care to babble can be summed up in one word: paperwork.
Imagine the paperwork. Imagine the level of planning, recruitment, coordination, control, and unbelievable nerve required to pull off a conspiracy of that magnitude. Really picture it in detail. At the very least you’re talking about hiring hundreds of civil servants cold-hearted enough to turn a blind eye to the murder of thousands of their fellow countrymen. If you were dealing with faultless, emotionless robots – maybe. But this almighty conspiracy was presumably hatched and executed by fallible humans. And if there’s one thing we know about humans, it’s that our inherent unreliability will always derail the simplest of schemes.
It’s hard enough to successfully operate a video shop with a staff of three, for Christ’s sake, let alone slaughter thousands and convince the world someone else was to blame.
The Hell of it All Page 21