'Turdy-facy-nasty-paty-lousy-fartical rogues'

It's been a long and tiring day, teaching several things which required extra energy to get students engaged. This isn't a moan by the way: it's what gets me up in the morning. We had a seminar on Ben Jonson's Volpone, a witty, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny play which casts a baleful, misanthropic eye on a world cheapened by greed, commerce and corruption. Can't think what led me to put it on a course in this day and age. Here's Volpone disguised as Scoto the Mountebank, flogging quack cures to the gullible



Other mountebanks are fraudulent, of course, or as Volpone calls them, 'turdy-facy-nasty-paty-lousy-fartical rogues'

Quite neatly, I went straight into the Ethics and Media class, which is largely actually populated by students from Religious Studies courses. After several weeks exploring Bentham, Mill and Kant, we're at the stage of doing case studies. Today was advertising: can it be ethical at all? How does it work? We looked at Kerry Katona's banned loan shark advert,



a furniture ad, one for shampoo (replete with dodgy statistics and misleading claims) and discussed whether the onus is on the advertiser to be truthful (if such a thing is possible) or on the buyer to be aware. More than a few decided that it's OK for corporations to lie because they need to make a profit.

Conversation turned to pseudo-science and surveys as they're used in ads. The cohort choice is never presented, neither are the questions or contexts. The numbers are laughably low: none of this would every stand up to scrutiny. This of course gave me the chance to show them one of my favourite comedy scenes, from Yes, Prime Minister. It's funny because it's still true, in politics as in commerce:



It still raised a laugh from the students, who have never heard of the show before, so respect is due to the authors. Sadly I didn't have time to show them another of my favourite exchanges, on newspaper readerships:



I used to think this was comedy:



until the banking crash, and in particular the sight of a line of bank CEOs admitting to Parliament that they didn't have any financial qualifications and didn't actually understand how the financial instruments they sold actually worked (or failed to work). Can't find a clip, but here's the exchange:

Q779 Nick Ainger: Let us start with you, Sir Tom: what banking qualifications have you got?
Sir Tom McKillop: I do not have any formal banking qualifications. I was five years in (?).
Sir Fred Goodwin: Whether you would call them banking qualifications or not, but I have a degree in law; I qualified as a chartered accountant; I was in public practice, including auditing banks for a number of years; I was involved in winding-up banks and then looking at providing advice for banks; I was Chief Executive of Clydesdale Bank; and I was a Chief Executive of Yorkshire Bank before I joined the Royal Bank of Scotland group in 1998 as Deputy Chief Executive.
Mr Hornby: I do not have any formal banking qualifications. I have an MBA from Harvard where I specialised in all the finance courses, including financial services; and before I took over as Chief Executive two years ago I was a Director of HBOS for seven years.
Lord Stevenson of Coddenham: Like Andy, I have no formal banking qualifications. I have of course been Chairman of the Bank for ten years; and before that I was initially, for about 20 years, an entrepreneurial businessman and I have run large businesses since then.

And now I'm going fencing. I haven't hit anyone all day and I feel the need.

News of the World: Well Ahead Of You

I've had this SOGAT, NGA, AUEW Boycott Murdoch mug on my desk for several years, hailing from a sadly lost age in which trades unions were important. I'm now feeling quite smug (and open to offers).

Meanwhile, did you listen to the Today show on Radio 4 this morning. I was quite taken by the advertising executive Nicola Mendelsohn, who described her children as a 'little focus group' who are marvellous consumers of advertising (from 2 hours 45 onwards). Bill Hicks clearly didn't die in vain then.

The piece was a sob-story about the challenge facing advertisers when we all hate adverts, attached to the withdrawal of advertising from the News of the World. As you can imagine, the tears were rolling down my face as I imagined her dossing down in her Porsche Cayenne, an iPad for a pillow.

Lynx: late to the game

People still seem to be a little shocked by nasty Lynx deodorant adverts ironically promising lots of sex of you spray their foul potion over your spotty adolescent crevices.

Corporations aren't new at this - have a look at this Swinging Sixties Old Spice ad:

Hard times call for desperate remedies

I took this picture yesterday. Sublime!

Maybe it's just me…

This advert made me hugely angry last night. IT's the casual abuse of the language of rights. This would be OK if everyone already possessed the rights to life, free speech, freedom of assembly, privacy and all the other rights listed in the UN Declaration - but they don't. So for a bloody deodorant manufacturer to steal the language to sell some chemical paste is just hugely insulting - it turns fundamental arguments about the human condition into a joke.

The Rights of Undera..
Watch the ad...

Whose city?

No sooner do I buy a book about the privatisation of our urban space than this story pops up: Londoners will lose access to 60 miles of road during the Olympics, to provide exclusive lanes for Olympic athletes, officials… and 'marketing partners'.

I'm all for getting athletes and officials to their competitions on time - I'm hoping to be involved with the fencing in some way - but allowing salesmen and advertising shills to lord it over the citizens makes me think of 'democratic' Russia's special lanes for the Soviet ruling classes, a habit that hasn't yet died. I'm also horrified that organisations such as McDonald's are permitted to become 'partners'.

I hope London's drivers, pedestrians and cyclists ignore this disgraceful insult to citizens and taxpayers. Rebel!

The 'marketers' can travel in blimps. They already look down on us.

Airline FAIL

Unfortunately it's not online and I don't have the newspaper with me, but did anyone else see Ryanair's Valentine advert?

It was pretty tasteless: an oral sex joke (a picture of a descending zip with the legend 'Going Down', referring to their prices, naturally), but it made me ponder the calibre of their advertising department.

Would you really want to associate aircraft with the phrase 'Going Down'?

All educational problems can be solved by breaking into song

Ewar has discovered a mini-musical by Yale University (!) as part of its recruitment drive. It's a kitsch classic, like a particularly humourless Christian rock odyssey. I won't steal his thunder by posting it here. You'll have to go here.

I'm mailing The Hegemon's marketing department right now.

More fun than marking!

If you haven't seen them, the Tories' poster campaign features a heavily airbrushed leader of the Tory Party with the slogan 'We can't go on like this' (which makes it sound like he's asking for a divorce).

Some naughty boys in the Labour Party have made the tools available to create your own. Here are some examples (I really like the Harry Enfield 'Tim Nice-but-Dim' one), and there are more here. Get the template here and use Franklin Gothic Demi for the font. I'll have a go once I've done more work.

Poetry? Please…

An article in today's Guardian discusses the use of poetry in adverts. Some poets say it's fine to write on commission for McDonald's, or for an insurance company. Other companies have used existing canonical texts.

In one sense, I'd like to think that a viewer might be surprised by a skilful or beautiful line in between being shouted at to buy more shit. However: as Bill Hicks says in relation to licensing your music for adverts - you're off the creative register for ever. Art is often, but shouldn't be, the creation of a desire for profit. The more beholden to trade it is, the worse the art - see Damien Hirst's 'art' if you don't believe me.

More to the point: most of the stuff masquerading as poetry in adverts isn't. It's verse, which isn't the same thing at all. Verse screams 'I'M ARTISTIC. THIS IS ART. LOOK HOW CLEVER I AM'. It's desperate for credibility and fails, if versifying is the only skill on display.

Poetry, rhyming or not, is unsettling. In it, meaning is ambiguous, or arrived at through an alchemical transformation of words and your own imagination. The 'meaning' is as emotional as it is rational, perhaps more.

I can't think of any poem which can be boiled down to 'buy our burgers'. Here's Bill's take on it:

The Rolling Stones - they haven't sold out

Or rather, they sold out very early indeed, as this Rice Krispies ad from the 1960s demonstrates:

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Is this the most sexist advert ever made?

Depressingly, it probably isn't, but it must be close. Reducing women to component parts. Mmm… dehumanising.

Capitalism's bizarre appropriations

We're all used to - and I'm still infuriated by - adverts buying up music by bands I like, especially when the band has lost control of their work. But it's the way of the world. Capitalism refreshes itself by appropriating the energy and attitude of youth and other cultures, killing them in the process.

Now, Alex Ross points out that a certain manufacturer of very expensive jeans which aren't intrinsically better than any other brand, has incorporated Charles Ives and Walt Whitman into an ad. Ives was a brilliant modernist composer, though he never let during his successful career as an insurance executive, and Whitman was the demonstratively homosexual bard of 19th-century American expansionism. It's always possible that the company thought it was buying the music of Owen Pallett, who's mixed Ives into his own piece, but it's weird, nonetheless, and culturally insensitive. Does it cheapen the music, or bring the ad to the level of art?

Rude management gits

I'd almost forgotten: some months ago, it was announced that the university, despite being several million pounds in deficit, had contracted McCann Erickson (a very expensive advertising/PR firm) to do some promotional work for us, even though we have all the resources to do it ourselves. I mailed the director of communications on April 9th to ask how much it cost - no reply so far.

So I've mailed him again, having heard that he mentioned my mail to his colleagues:

Dear A....., I mailed you several months ago asking you about the McCann Erickson arrangement.

Due, presumably, to an oversight, I appear not to have received any sort of reply from you. Do you think you could address my query?

Yours with thanks and in anticipation of a speedy response,

Food processors are great!

I don't like advertising. Especially pro-pollution ads, so it annoys me when The Guardian, which cares about the environment, runs ads for airlines and SUVs etc - because they need the money. George Monbiot rants about it much better than I could (and without early Blur references in the title).

Advertising - even The Inferno's too good for them

Finding a screwed up piece of newspaper on my desk, I realise that it's because I wanted to post an extract from a witty column, in the Irish Times Saturday magazine. I often pull book reviews out - and only buy a tenth of those I save (thankfully).

Anyway, this is John Butler ranting about the hair dye advert featuring two bossy little girls:

Looking at that strange smile, it's hard not to think that a small part of the melancholy stems from the fact that this man will never again be able to read the newspaper in its entirety on a Sunday. He seems to convey great regret at having fathered these two girls, along with grief for his weekend and for his wife - because frankly, his children are out of control. The five-year-old has been possessed by a much older, image-obsessed harridan, who believes that Daddy will never again have sexual intercourse unless he dyes his hair, and a second daughter who agrees that this is somehow both their business and their responsibility.

And so it goes on in a similarly droll vein… Girls: mummy's dead, and her replacement will be cruel to you. You'll deserve every second of it. And when the advertising genius who came up with this dies, I hope there's a hell consisting of little girls who rub hair dye in his eyes and smash up his iPhone over and over again for ever.

Friday's conundrum (again)

Today's Friday Conundrum is quite simple: who really needs a slap?

My list is obviously endless, with Hazel Blears at the top, but taking in people with hairstyles, Tories, entire categories such as advertising and PR workers, 4x4 drivers, litterbugs, UKIP, anyone who uses their mobile telephone as a music player, Steve Quitterill…

I get readers - accidentally

I've had an astonishingly lazy day - got up disgracefully late and read the newspapers until now. I'm not even awake enough to be angry about anything (except for the Gillette advert which uses the word 'refuel' to make using moisturizer 'macho' - which merely reinforces sexual stereotypes). Almost got me there  - but an ad for Star Trek has calmed the bile. 

I know the web is meant to reforge social networks - but how does someone in South Africa searching for 'West Midlands Limo Hire' get to my thoughts on Jade Goody?