Poison in the well
posted by saurabh in Schmadvertising |Yesterday I happened to watch the above advertisement on television. It made me more enraged than I have been in a long time, so that by the end of it I was swearing loudly at the screen and flipping it the bird with both hands. Here was some marrowless, etiolated corporation, deigning to tell me what my dreams had been as a child, attempting to rewrite my memory! “That was your dream”? No. No, no. My dreams weren’t so hollow. I didn’t dream of owning your pathetic piece of plastic bric-a-brac, you vampires. My dreams were much larger. I dreamt of rocketing through endless space and of walking on the flat, black bottom of the ocean. I dreamt of moving the sun, of churning clouds into whirlpools in the sky, of opening my hand and releasing hummingbirds, of shaking gold dust from my hair, kissing rose-fingered Eos as she came up over the horizon, spreading my wings and flying. I dreamt I was Batman. I was Hanuman. I was Hercules, wrapped in the skin of the Nemean lion. I was the Buddha. I was all of Creation.
This is an evil plague, my beloved friends. This is a disgusting and savage attack on all of humanity. Stealing our dreams? What else do they take every day? My capacity to love has shriveled up - I have been taught that it should not extend beyond the clarity of my love’s skin, the luster of her hair, the mere shape of her bones. My capacity to be loved is a similar husk - my worth is decided by the scent I wear and the type of orange-infused vodka I drink. I have no aspirations. I am merely a collection of desires for material possessions. For them I bend and obey.
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tyger
Jeez dude/dudette;
Your second rate childhood dreams remind me of the satisfaction that poor children get from having ONE toy and making it do for many things. The empty shoebox that functioned as a treasure chest for shiny things, square things, round things, a house for imaginary stick men, a habitat for bugs scooped up in the dirt, a place for three crayons, a wheel-less wagon that you pushed from one side of the room to another, a diorama arranged on your shelf.
Imagination is the burden forced on the underprivileged, forced to live life in their heads while they imagine how it would be to play with tactile, fully formed, plastic mold-injected soldiers, arrayed in assault against the menace of giant Barbies lounging unsuspecting in their Malibu homes. Like the happy kids on TV do.
But no longer do children need to suffer the loneliness of adventure that takes place only in their imagination; lost forever when they snuff.
And that’s the slice of immortality brought to you by Sprint.
Sprint offers you the solution for a small fee; a pittance outweighed by the benefit of sharing your vignettes with the hivemind. Where they’ll exist as searchable bits long after you’re gone. How can you tattoo the internets if you never connect? How will people know that you ever existed?
I can’t believe you were outraged by that joke! It’s funny! NO ONE can possibly take that thing seriously.
“Magic screen”? HAH!
Uh… that’s a bit of a rant for a stupid commercial, isn’t it?
Personally, i think it’s one of the best commercials out there right now. It’s simple, cute and proves you don’t need a bloated budget and CGI to make a visually stunning ad. So what is their product is shitty? I think there is a ton of far more infuriating ads on TV. Actually, these days TV has a lot more annoying things than commercials, like Nancy Grace, the Alberto Gonzales hearings, Scott Baio and the Age of Love.
Yeah, the commercial is well-made, and pretty. So what? Lots of evil things are beautiful. Guns can be aesthetically pleasing, too.
My point was not that their product was shitty. You seem to have missed my point, so I’ll say it very plainly:
Advertising is all around us, constantly teaching us that our desires should be focused at the level of consumption of products. For example, THIS ad teaches us that our childhood dreams were to possess a stupid cellphone (or whatever the fuck it is). Since advertising is so pervasive, I believe this has an enormous destructive impact. Not only does it say “you can find fulfillment through Product X”, it ALSO says, “There is nothing more fulfilling than this.” I found this in particular offensive because it was so clearly telling me not just what I should think, but what I thought in the past. Ads are not just “annoying” - we all watch them, and we all absorb their message. Sometimes we should pay attention to what, exactly, that message is. The people who make ads are keenly aware of what it is they’re doing to sell us products - they have long since moved past the point of merely advertising its features. Now they tie the products they are selling to our sexuality, our greed, our desire to be respected, loved, feared, etc. Absorbing this message diminishes us.