It’s no news that ads are popping up in just about every place that there is any available digital or analog real estate upon which to plaster them. Some great examples of this are motion graphics in train tunnels, trains, planes and automobiles fully wrapped in adds, and finally (my favorite) ads crammed into the vertical whitespace of staircases.

On the Chicago El train the other day, I came across an ad on the ceiling!! On the ceiling!! As if the ones on the walls and the outside of the train weren’t enough. And of all things, the ad was for toilet paper. Is toilet paper something that really needs to be advertised? Have bidets been making enough of a comeback to put toilet paper industry at risk? Well, in all fairness, I guess like any other commercial product, there’s some stiff (or should i say soft and luxurious!) competition between brands. At least it’s not philosophically as bad as ad campaigns for avocadoes, milk or cheese. What’s the alternate? Not cheese?

But I don’t think we’ve gone far enough with ads. I think that there are several more frontiers that have yet to be explored:

1) Sleepvertising Think of the 8+ hours a day people waste not being exposed to ads! What better things do we have to do during this ‘downtime’ (repair cells? flush our brains of unnecessary memories? i think that stuff is a bunch of science mumbo jumbo). Why waste time dreaming about silly things like unicorns or flying through galaxies when you could dream about swimming through a sea of chocolate ….. Ghirardelli’s Decadent Deluxe 70% Cacao chocolate, that is I’m sure the people at Nielsen or Google can come up with a pillow-top box or inner-ear insert which could serve up these ads. Wow – the idea of contextually-relevant ads in dreams is quite disturbing: does this mean that, in my dreams, when I get up on stage, stark naked, to perform a solo on the mandolin (which I’ve never played), someone in the audience will offer to sell me Gap Khakis and/or give me mandolin lessons? Sweet!

2) Eatvertising Brightly colored packaging is great for advertising to kids on cereal boxes, but what about all those opportunities for completely unbranded foodstuffs, such as the meat or potatoes served in a restaurant? I’d be perfectly happy enjoying a free meal at a fancy Chicago steakhouse, even if it did mean that each individual slice of my steak had a little graphic on it which reminded me that this meal was ‘made possible by’ some local law firm or megacorporation. You could always just flip it over or smear some mashed potatoes on top and make believe that you’re eating unbranded meat.

3) Adver-advertising-tising Think about how much space in a normal ad is wasted not getting the point across. For example, take the generic example of a condominium ad that shows someone enjoying a glass of wine and a sparkling view of the city skyline from their super-modern granite kitchen in their new condo. Why does it have to be ‘just a glass of wine.’ Can’t it be a glass of Francis Ford Coppola 2005 Zinfandel Reserve? And why settle for an unbranded faucet when it can be a Koehler? By embedding ads in other ads, corporations can maximize the impact of a single impression and also promote partnerships.

I hope that, in the future, advertisers and marketers will wise up and figure out how to relieve us of all these ad-impoverished moments of our lives, and also figure out how to maximize the times when we are obediently absorbing these messages by cramming as many pitches as possible into a given time and space.

No related posts.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 11:02 am and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.