By Al Kahol Email Author Copyright 4/07/2004
   
Advertising, something you'll never see us do* *don't see bottom of page


"The 1972 Honda Accord. If you bought one today, you might be tried and convicted of Grand Thrift Auto!"

Enter horrible music and sub-par product shots.

I've always felt that I could easily move into the career of advertising/marketing/brainwashing the general public.

How often have you bought something and felt cheated by the overall crappiness of the product. You're reading this and being cheated at the moment. It's not well written or entertaining, but you're still going to end up reading it. The same thing happens with advertising. You think it's going to be good and it invariably is not.

To show off my superfly advertising skills, I thought that I'd show you a couple right now.

As you can see by this, my advertising pulls no punches. It's just like me in real life, I tell it like it is.
If you're getting fat, you'll hear about it. If you're a minority and I don't like you, expect cream pies in the face and rocks thrown at your car from bridges on highways. And then there's the annoying jail time until I have to kill the warden and then brutally murder my parole officer...but that's not a story for now.

Back to the advertising, it sends out a very clear message. That message is that if you do not choose to purchase the product you will get sick and die by not going to the toilet often enough. This is a clever advertising tactic because people are afraid of death. This is an extention of people being afraid of aging (That's right Joan Collins, you're going to get older) and therefore losing their youthful exuberance which via other advertising tells us that being young and buying particular products is the only way to have fun.

So by explaining in the advertisement for Metamucil that there is a chance of dying over something as simple as not going to the toilet, it shows the chump...err, target their own mortality and how trivial it really is. Then by ending the ad in the short fragment of, "Buy or die" it gives the person reading the choice of either buying a product or inevitable death. I'm sure most people would prefer not to die and therefore buy the product.

And if you thought that ad was poorly done, just wait and see the next one. Yet another advertisement lovingly created on Paint.

Again, the deadly truth.
Most men who are basically 99% of the expensive car market are afraid that their manhood might not match up to say, mine. This makes them feel inadequate as they are inferior male specimens and need to find some way to make this up to themselves. By coming straight out and saying this, it automatically sends this thought process through the below-average male (which I am not, wink, wink, taps front of pants). Then as the eye scrolls down the ad they see the lovely car and then the main slogan, "Ferrari - Compensate". By putting Ferrari and Compensate together, it implies that they are both one and the same. Buying a Ferrari will compensate for whatever problems you have and Compensation means buying a Ferrari.
With this in mind along with the initial sentence mocking the reader, they will feel as though the perfect answer to their problems is a Ferrari.

Of course the below-average male cannot afford a Ferrari, and will therefore become depressed and jump in front of a large building that is being towed by some rocket powered, magical truck of sorts.

For the poor man, I am developing another ad. Just imagine the cheapest car you can think of with the words, "You're terrible in bed!" above the picture, and then below the picture of the car, "So be great in the backseat". Since a 1972 Honda Accord for example does little for compensation, all I could hope for would be some sort of false hope.

My last piece of my overly shoddy advertising is regarding to another family favourite, SPAM!

Spam as we all know has absolutely no good points. It doesn't taste or look good, it's only well known because it is more or less a joke with everyone and no one is actually sure about what it is. However we do know some aspects of it, and they aren't good. They're very bad in fact. So bad that no self respecting person would choose to eat it. But over the years I have broken the morale of many people I dislike and it's overly easy to do so. A couple of fat jokes and bam! Straight to the refridgerator for fatty.

So by pointing out the bad points of spam, and making a likeness to the bad points of this particular person reading it, it should hopefully depress them and send them into some sort of eating frenzy. I'm not sure how it works though. People make fun of you because you're fat, so you spend every waking moment with fried chicken in one hand, a tub of ice-cream in the other and a steady stream of tears rolling down your blubbery cheeks. And I'm talking about the face here, just to avoid confusion. If you don't like being called fat, then don't eat.

So by showing the similarities in spam and the advertising target, which is an insult in itself and by saying overly cruel things, it should start one of these eating frenzies.

Then by saying, "Eat Spam, it's destiny fatso" it implies that it was inevitable this was going to happen and that Spam was going to be consumed at some time. This ad however has no good points to make people feel better about themselves, but is possibly the only way that anyone could manage to sell spam.


So that is the end of my little advertising campaign, which I hope has shown you how in fact something might be marketed towards yourself and the manner in which I would attempt to do so. Yes, I know all of the ads looked terrible and I'll just say that they are early prototypes in an effort to cover up that it was my best effort and I'm horribly depressed, and that all of the ads were sort of like a horrible insight into my psyche.

Until then everything is drugs and Russian roulette with a fully loaded pistol and advertising that will get me in more hot water than Michael Jackson at Disneyland.

Remember: if you want to move into advertising, don't lie about the product. Tell it like it is. There is no greater tool than making people feel guilty or depressed. Those people trying to get you to sponsor children in the middle of nowhere use both tactics. For example use this tactic when trying to sell a video game, "Little Billy wants (game name) for his birthday. If you don't buy it for him he'll hate you and slit his wrists! Is the price of a game worth your child's life?" See, that makes you feel terrible as a parent as you know your childs death could easily be avoided.

As long as your ads make people feel inadequate, make them fear their own mortality, or the mortality of loved ones, or make them fall into the deep abyss of depression, you're doing your job nicely. "Congratulations Mr. Johnson. You've been promoted to Nazi!"

I'd like a promotion, regardless of what it means I end up doing, but with these advertising techniques, I could be rubbing shoulders with Hitler himself!

It's part of the human condition to want something, and then want something else once you have it. If you break someone's spirit, they'll only want what you sell.

Feasties. If you don't like it Ozma will be so upset he'll kill his family. Do you want to be responsible for a mass murder?
I didn't think so.

Of course you don't, so send us money.


 

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