Hoardings

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

Advertisements offer the best and fastest sociology.  The extreme economic Darwinism of the industry - where accounts, even the most successful, are rarely kept for long - ensures a constant scrabbling after the very latest in ideas and trends.  Furthermore, the format of advertisements demands that concepts be simple, striking and memorable; tapping into society's deepest fears and desires - particularly if hitherto unarticulated - has proved to be one of the most effective ways to achieve this.

This sociological aspect of advertising is well-known; what is recognised less widely is the industry's assumption of the Church's mantle of unending textual exegesis.

Once the place of Christianity at the heart of medieval society was assured, expansionary proselytism was replaced by consolidating interpretation, and action by thought.  The rich and powerful monasteries were filled with the best minds of the day, with little to do but read the unchanging word of God.  As a result, with time and through a natural desire to surpass predecessors and teachers, simple commentaries blossomed into ever more recondite investigations of meanings and patterns.  

A single phrase, of little import in itself, might, in the obsessive mind of a monk, attain through brilliant if empty explication some pivotal significance.  And pondered long enough, most sequences of events or sets of relationships can be mapped on to any other; hence the Bible was found to be an endlessly echoing, self-referential book of inexhaustible complexity.

And so it is within the domain of advertising.  Latter-day monks in the form of account executives are similarly closeted with a fixed text - that of the product - which they must then expound to the world, and find new ways of explaining.  Like their medieval forebears, they are burdened and constrained by all previous interpretations - that is, all previous campaigns.  Sometimes they will react against them; sometimes they will build on them, extending an idea by a series of elaborate mental tropes and toccatas.

Advertisements provide the most detailed, most ingenious examination of our lives that there is.  Just when we thought that every nuance, every angle, every possible allusive joke had been dug out of the baked bean, the latest young advertising star pushes an idea further, notices another avenue, produces another pun.  This frenetic investigation proceeds on several fronts: the basic concept and its gamut of cultural, intellectual, economic, sociological and sexual references; the name of the product, and all its associations, rhymes, similes, homonyms and homophones; and visual elements, be it in terms of the shape of the product, its colour, a typeface or simply a design associated with the brand.  

The net effect is that we are amazed that our world even in its most trivial aspects is so rich; we are grateful that each day we gain a fresh and exciting perspective on everything in it.  And if we buy the concept, we might even buy the product.

(1989)

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The check-out

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

It is a sketch from countless comedy shows.  A man goes into a supermarket.  He lingers oddly over the carrots, he inspects carefully the boxes of soap.  His whole body speaks unease; he is shifty and continually looking over his shoulder.  Finally, he judges the moment to be right: he boldly seizes his prey and half runs up to the check-out till.  Just as he lays the article on the counter, from nowhere a woman appears and queues behind him.  The cashier decides to savour to the full the process of ringing up the price and finding a suitable bag.  All this while, the man's small package lies there accusingly, naked to the world; it seems to glow with obviousness.  Even in the age of AIDS, buying condoms is still not easy.

Our delicacy in purchasing intimate items such as these is purely vestigial.  For the most part, individuated goods have been reduced to abstract commodities: when you load up a trolley in a supermarket, it is almost as if you are buying generalised objects, things shucked of any purpose except to be bought, a fact underlined by the meaningless brand names and bland packaging which de-emphasise the good's real function.

So it is that we happily buy personal goods like expectorants and toilet paper without making the embarrassing connection with their final use - as we do with condoms.  Standing in the queue with these goods for all the world to see, we can pretend to disown them and their revelations, if only because everyone else tacitly agrees to do the same.

And yet that basket and each of its goods says something completely specific about you, your habits and your tastes.  If sociologists were to watch you at the check-outs, they could re-construct your daily life as an archaeologist reconstructs the past from its rubble.  Each item represents a line in the multi-dimensional space of consumerism; where all those lines intersect, is you.

This is not as abstract as it sounds.  Sociologists may not be hiding behind the sliced bread to carry out their research, but the statisticians are there.  One of the main reasons for the introduction of bar-coding in supermarket chains is to define who you, the public, are in precisely this way.  It is certainly not to speed up the process of checking out: the bottleneck is merely displaced from the pricing to the packing.  Instead it gives the stores employing barcodes in-depth and instant knowledge about purchasing patterns.

Hitherto, data on sales has been obtained by stocktaking - a slow and inefficient process.  Now, stores can see a snapshot of what is being sold at any instant by downloading the information from the automated tills and combining the data.  Moreover, if you pay by some form of identifying credit or debit card, an alternative picture could be built up, of your purchases over time.  From that it would be possible to make good guesses at your income, your family size, your tastes - even your sexual habits.  Imagine now a cashless society, and one where all such sales data were linked together: total information on every individual.  Governments are doubtless checking it out at this very moment.

(1989)

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