The USS Quad Damage

Driver points to ad campaign for his digitally enhanced road rage

So I’ve had a problem with this ad since it was released. I mean really an ad that basically says, hey if you speed you have a small penis. Firstly I’d like to see some sort of research done proving it. However worse than that the ad introduces to the mainstream a gesture which can be used in any situation to say that any male has a small penis. Really if it was targeted at women it would have been pulled within the first week.

Now imagine this.

An elderly lady passes by her doctors office which a sign saying Free Pap Smear screening, looks at it, says bah and walks off. She sees a couple of teenage boys with their index and middle fingers raised and then they seperate them into the classic english offensive V symbol.

Cut to a young adult woman smoking in a bus shelter. A middle aged man walks past making the same gesture as the woman blows smoke in his direction.

Next scene there’s an overweight woman chowing down on obviously unhealthy and abundant take away food. Think Mc Donalds or similar food. Some athletic man on his daily jog runs past and makes the gesture.

The message?

Look after your health or your a VD carring whore – The Cancer Council

Worse than that there is now a simple gesture you can use to offend any women as they’ll all know what you mean by it.

Obviously the scenes could go in any order. However the point is that if this was ever put on TV it’d be pulled within a week as sexist and extremely offensive. Yet the RTA ad remains which is pretty much the same thing but aimed at young men.

I skimmed over a thread on facebook for some reason about climate change. Anyway it got me thinking about how both sides to the arguement have people, studies and evidence they claim backs their side. The problem, as I see it anyway, for the average person is that we’ve moved into an era where marketing and advertising has warped peoples ability to take at any sort of face value anything said by anyone.

For instance every new dishwashing liquid, powder, powerball, etc,… is a massive break through that will leave your glasses sparkling and have been since the dishwasher was invented. Surely there is some point where dishwashing reagents moved from being unable to completely clean glasses to an a time when they could. Meaning that at some point in the past dishwashing reagent vendors were lying about their products ability and at some point past that (possibly in the future) they were lying about improving their product. This the properties assigned to the product via advertising are not linked to the actual product.

See what has happened is that the marketing of a product isn’t actually linked to the product. Ie; it’s branding. Which appears to be giving products properties not linked to their actual real world properties. In 2003 movie The Corporation, Naomi Klein said “the corporations of the future do not produce products. They produce brand meaning. The dissemination of the idea of themselves is their act of production.”. Which appears atleast to me to mean the same thing.

Now with dishwashing reagents you can test it. Buy the product, test it out, see if it works, if it doesn’t go back to the old. However if your looking at climate change how do you test that as an average citizen? Not only that but how do you test the solutions and know they are the right ones?

The obvious answer is to have someone checking for bullshit. The only problem is that the people who’ve been entrusted to do that in the past, the media, either are incapible of it or just have no interest in it because they’ve become part of the system of branding. See Jon Stewarts crossfire interview. I mean really when was the last time you saw anything that even came close to journalism in any major newspaper or major tv station? If you say Fox news, TT or ACA or anything along those lines hang your head in utter shame.

Sadly considering that dictionary.com defines Journalism as “writing that reflects superficial thought and research, a popular slant, and hurried composition, conceived of as exemplifying topical newspaper or popular magazine writing as distinguished from scholarly writing” I can only guess that society is going to have to come up with some new institution to fill the void abandoned by major media organisations.