Choices, choices

Selling has been with us for as long as there has been more mammoth meat than the tribe needed that day and some bloke painted a really, really, luscious drawing of a mammoth on the cave wall. This would ultimately lead to disappointment when the world’s first fast food customer looked inside their styrofoam (STILL not decomposed) container and wondered a) what relationship the slightly damp and manky contents within bore to the plump and delightful illustration on the wall and b) what the hell a gerkin was.

Selling an idea has been with us for a slightly shorter time, this required blokes in robes with questionable facial hair and a shedload of wine. Initially many of these ideas were quite straightforward and useful, dealing as they did with issues of mathmatics, geometry and so forth and would result in nothing more than ensuring the future employment of slightly lanky men who would make a living tutoring algebra and making the inventor of the protractor one of the wealthiest men on the planet.

However, it wasn’t long before the greybeards started coming up with ideas like democracy and freedom of expression and, what’s more, tried to persuade others that their ideas were good ones.

Government trying to sell something is not as straightforward as a campaign selling, say, pickle onion flavoured monster munch. One is trying to sell you something cooked up by evil trolls that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth and is not at all good for you, the other is a delicious snack remembered with fond nostalgia. (But, let’s be honest, was probably cooked up by evil trolls, left a nasty taste in the mouth, was not at all good for you AND left you with chemically induced halitosis) (and a slightly dirty feeling that you’d not experience again until your first illicit shag) (and even then not with the same intensity).

Previous Government ad campaigns have basically fallen into two categories.

The first tried to terrify you. The one about not bonking icebergs or whatever was a good example and had a profound effect on me, to the extent that not only icebergs but penguins, pemmican and the even the cresta run are all safe from my sexual attention. And there was ‘protect and survive’, where the Voice Of Doom explained that if you hid in airing cupboard, you’d be safe from a thermonuclear blast. Whether this was followed by a further film giving recipes for radioactive rat I don’t know, I was busy changing out of damp pants.

But they were as nothing compared with that cartoon about the kid who decided to wander onto the thin ice, which concluded with a shot of the flickering lights of an ambulance in the chill dusk as the bowed figures carried a shape on a stretcher. A decade on and anyone watching a soft focus artfully shot cartoon about a wintry scene was emptied of all emotion except harrowing dread. That’s why I cry when I watch ‘The Snowman’, whimsy be damned.

The other type of Government advertising is when they sold you something you already owned, like utilities. ‘If you see Sid, tell him…that in a decade all his gas will come from politically unstable Eastern European states which previously we had feared because they had sheds full of rusting nuclear weapons or, worse, empty sheds where rusting nuclear weapons should be prior to being sold to terrorists, but who can now hold the nation to ransom by turning off the tap the next time there’s a cold snap’.

Wisdom of the policy aside, I would have liked to see the ad campaign selling off the forests. Question, who would you get to front it, a celeb or a chirpy CGI squirrel called Terry Nutkins who would blether on about how being given the chance to buy his own tree would give him a foot on the property ladder? Or an Ewok?

Selling two conflicting ideas though? Easy. Crisp makers have campaigns to ‘support’ a particular flavour. Result: you just end up buying more of something that’s the same thing really, you think you’ve exercised choice, and you have a nasty taste in your mouth.