You would think that little arrow on The Age this morning would give you a drop down for national news, right?
Wrong!
The papers run the whole gamit of ads from completely in your face through to sneaky idiotic things like this, and wonder why they are going down the tube.
There’s a giant peach sculpture in Sydney at the moment; it’s really an advertisement for Ella Bache skin products. They are real peaches, but only skin deep, being supported by a steel armature and polystyrene, as you can see from the short making of video. I wonder what kind of glue sticks peaches and if they had to use industrial strength botox to preserve them? After all it looks as if the peaches were attached before the piece was moved into place. LPlater saw the peaches being spray-painted and touched up after a week. I’m not sure whether to think that ironic or true to the nature of the advertiser’s business. Both probably. Has anyone or any creature taken a nibble? It doesn’t look like it. All very bizarre.
Amy writes about how Coke is at least making the right noises about respecting users wishes in relation to Facebook Beacon. Dave thinks Facebook was deliberately testing the waters. Of course leaking to test or dilute reaction has been a political tool for eons.
I’ve heard Roger Law, one of the creators of the famed satirical 1980’s TV puppet show Spitting Image talk about pushing the envelope of what is acceptable socially. He said that at that time in the UK, it was much more difficult to publish questionable material in the print media, whereas censorship was less strict and it was easier to get away with more on TV. He wondered if a reason might be that TV was taken less seriously. He added that if your show was successful, you could then be more audacious next time, even from week to week. I thought that was really interesting, and I’ve watched it happen since. The Chaser is an example; you couldn’t imagine them getting away with things like the APEC security breach or the Eulogy Song if they were new kids on the block. Think, too, how the excuser of the disastrous Lindsay fake political flyer, tried to palm it off as a ‘Chaser-style prank’ without understanding that tradition.
I guess the web is also somewhat differentiated from the older media with regard to pushing the boundaries of conventional feelings about privacy and social mores, and advertising within it is pushing the envelope in every which way it can, seeking new niches. I don’t want anything to do with Facebook’s advertising, and it is one of a number of reasons I remain somewhat aloof from FB. But I expect that what seems audacious today, the type of targeted advertising within social networks that Facebook (even if it has backtracked to an opt-in basis) has introduced, will become just like the furniture tomorrow, for better or worse. Chris Matyszczyk challengingly points out that this sits with a tradition, too.
