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Three of The Yorker's blogs team have had a hard think about what general rules they live their lives by and written them down in the form of their own Personal Philosophies.
It's not that I hate all adverts and advertising - many are quite artistic, witty or intelligent and the endless ways people think of to try and persuade you to consume are quite fascinating.
But that's just it. I'm not quite comfortable with the fact that a whole team of people have got together in a room and thought of ways to get their product or service into my head above all others, or even try to make me buy something I never needed or wanted in the first place.
Pro-V: it's a word they made up to make shampoo sound important
Particularly riling are the adverts that try to promote themselves alongside some current issue. Such as the scores of adverts suggesting you buy their product in order to beat the credit crunch. You couldn't make up that kind of irony. And the "credit crunch"-based selling is only starting to detract from all the "green" and "healthy" selling.
Add to that a sprinkling scientific terms like "pentapeptides" and "antioxidents"; a few registered trademarks like Pro-V and Bifidus Regularis; and some euphemisms for downright strange ingredients (mmm... shampoo with royal jelly) and you've got some incredibly infuriating adverts. Particularly when you read the small print or ingredients and find out that, for example, despite all those "good [unscientifically proven] bacteria", Yakult contains more sugar than Coca-Cola. Some of the adverts on our screens border on outright deception and it's only our advertising standards laws and bodies that stop them from telling flagrant lies.
This being said, I'm not with the Bill Hicks school who wish death upon those who work in advertising. Putting the dubious goal aside, advertising is a great medium and furthers work in the fields of art, music, sociology and psychology. Maybe I'm just bitter about having one of these suggestible human brains...
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