Denise Haskew clearly watched too much commercial television over the recent holidays. Here, she vents her spleen at those television adverts that try to persuade you life is a disease.

Article first published: March/April 2007

What’s the secret of beautifully smooth, wrinkle-free skin? Well, I’m no dermatologist, but I suspect being 19 helps. Because that’s how old the woman in the last anti-aging ad I saw looks. Meanwhile, the voiceover in the spot grimly invites us to asks ourselves: do we suffer from aging skin?

“Suffer”? “Suffer?” What can that mean? It doesn’t hurt. Nor am I suffering emotionally. Is my skin aging? Well, of course it is. I live on a planet that requires most of us fauna to ingest vast amounts of the megatoxin oxygen. Until someone can do something meaningful about the time-space continuum or I can learn to avoid taking in oxygen without the usual grim consequences, it will continue to age. But to suggest that this implies suffering is insidious in the extreme.

Do I “suffer” from aging hair? No, of course I don’t. It’s stone dead. Absolutely no nerve endings in my hair, thank you very much. Do I have bad hairs days? What do you think? But to be told I’m 'suffering' bad hair by a beautifully lit and diff’ed 18 year old (or in some cases, a reluctantly aging ‘celebrity beauty editor’) is nauseating to the point of throwing a brick at the telly.

Now, I’m not knocking TV adverts in general – I’m sure there a lot of you out there who make a decent, respectable living out of lighting and shooting them. But let me tell you how adverts should work in a healthy functioning neo-capitalist state. Person A has a requirement; corporation B has a product or service (let’s call it X) that will satisfy that requirement (not “solve” it – it’s a product, not a solution), and advertising agency C, through the most appropriate channels, lets person A know about it.

That’s how a healthy corrupt capitalist state works. But instead, we’ve misevolved into a system whereby corporation B comes up with a product that not only does person A not need, but no person in the Latin, Greek or Cyrillic alphabets needs, nor as ever conceived of needing; yet still agency C is employed to try and convince persons alpha to omega that their puny lives are worthless and meaningless without solution X.

Ask yourself: are you worried that your knuckles are getting wrinkly? Because frankly you’re suffering, and it’s about time you admitted it and did something about it.*

All of this doesn’t mean adverts can’t be creative. But we have to consider what is being sold here. I mean, am I the only one who feels a little bit queasy when I see pharmaceutical companies using fear to advertise pharmaceuticals for babies?

More risible still are the numerous debt consolidation ads: “are you worried your debts are getting on top of you? Does everybody seems to be chasing you for money? Does it seem there’s no light at the end of this tunnel of debt? Well, if your a homeowner, Vulture Financial can help. We can negotiate with your creditors on your behalf and consolidate all of your debt into one manageable monthly payment. So if you want to end your debt nightmare…” OK so far, but wait for the sting, “…or perhaps you want to take a holiday or need money for that special purchase?” So, you can’t sleep because of your debt mountain, but we can help by sending you on holiday and further increasing your debt. Nice one, guys. Thank you for smoking.

But let’s return to those solutions to things we didn’t even realize were problems. In this case, the ad has to be about the sell itself, not the product. ‘The medium not the message’. So what is important is not selling the virtues of the product (difficult when the product has no virtues), but instead using myriad persuasion strategies to shift boxes. Now I’m not going to run through all the tactics of the ad industry here, but the curious upshot is that after a time they come to believe their own myth: that is, if a product succeeds or fails, the credit or blame goes to the ad campaign as much as to the product (“shame about that fantastic award-winning campaign for the shit sandwich – I can’t see why it failed”).

Now this is good. For herein lies the petard from which they can be blown into a thousand pieces. If a creative agency believes that we as consumers should buy a product simply because we love the ad (and associate with the Z-list celebrity endorsing it, etc), then equally, we should boycott all products if we think the ads are crap. I keep a notebook by the telly to facilitate this very activity.

To be unscrupulously fair, I do switch brands if I see an ad I really like. But if the ad’s crap, it goes on the list and won’t be seen in my kitchen cupboard again. So am I suffering from bad TV ads? Yes I am. But knowing they can be proscribed in my Room 101 book is a solution that makes the whole experience palatable. I highly recommend it.

* How many of you actually looked at your knuckles? If you did, stop watching commercial television for a month.

Denise Haskew After 10 years as a television commissioning editor, Denise decided she needed a more intellectual challenge, so she gave it up to become a model. She has done all sorts of useless jobs, such as magazine publishing and PR. She plans to be on the first big spaceship to leave the Earth, alongside all the telephone sanitizers.