How on earth have we reached the stage where a supermarket Christmas TV ad can be considered important?
Several new Christmas traditions have emerged in recent years – the disappointing Winter Wonderland, claims about a ‘war on Christmas’ (and hold on, we’ll be coming back to that) – but perhaps the most obnoxious and cynical must be the relentless rise of the Christmas TV commercial.
Now, ‘spectacular’ Christmas ads are nothing new – when I was growing up, the star-studded Woolworth ads were oddly a big thing, mainly because people enjoyed spotting which famous names would pop up each year. What can I say? We only had three TV channels and had to make our own fun. But TV ads today – not just at Christmas, we should say – are increasingly contrived. And, let’s be blunt here, really fucking awful. If you are to believe the media, then we live in a golden age of television, commercial breaks included, but all you have to do is watch any channel for an hour or so to see the lie. Ad breaks are a relentless stream of charity donation demands from millionaires, insurance scams and endless offers for worthless souvenir coins, apparently now issued to commemorate every time the King gets out of bed unaided.
But at Christmas, we have the addition of awful supermarkets trying to pretend that (a) their offerings are not wildly overpriced and (b) they are somehow socially conscious. Christmas TV ads from these operations are designed to be Events. This usually means extravagant commercials featuring unlikely family parties that positively reek of desperation and forced bonhomie, awash with terrible celebrities – the established and the here today, gone later today flavours of the month alike – pretending that they are just like the rest of us, even as their fake parties with their fake friends are extravaganzas of privilege and entitlement. But that’s not even the worst part of all this.
No, the trend in recent years has been to stoke controversy, usually by upsetting the perpetually thin-skinned far right, the very people who are hard-wired to believe in the War on Christmas (see, I told you we’d come back to that), a war that is waged in TV ads via the inclusion of people who are not straight, white characters and disrespecting Christian Christmas traditions, which this year seems to include passing celebs trashing silvery paper hats and festive elves, just like the ones in the Bible. Social media has made it easier to be performatively outraged about these things than it might once have been while the Daily Mail, Express and such will egg the fury on because they need clickbait to make money, and what better clickbait than irrational outrage over nothing? Of course, the advertisers know that this will happen – whatever else they are, they are not morons and I’m assuming that ad agencies spend months working out how to stoke faux fury, knowing that not only will the resulting apoplexy create headlines but that there will be an immediate backlash to the reactionary right-wing anger from left-wing liberals lining up in defence of the ads – and in the process, talking about them a lot. Play your cards right and – as M&S did this year – you can offend both sides for different reasons and there will be global fabricated indignity, insincere apologies and the sort of publicity that money can’t buy. Get your ad ‘banned’ (as Iceland did in 2018 with a commercial that was brazenly political and so against broadcast rules, something they obviously knew would see it refused airplay) and you might even become the centre of a campaign to have it seen, getting you loads of attention from chin-stroking celebs and the sort of people that would otherwise scoff at your brand. The battles will go on for weeks sometimes, in social media and in newspaper columns. All over a fucking TV ad.
I’m amazed that people on both sides of the argument can’t see how ad agencies and giant corporations are playing them to maximise profit. Their ads are talked about as though they are somehow important things that we should all care about. This is insane. Advertising agencies and the companies they work for often tend to have a weirdly misguided belief in the importance of what they do, crafting ads with ongoing characters and narratives, aspirational lifestyles, sincere social commentary or wacky humour that – apparently – everyone talks about the next day at work. Advertisements are treated as though they are original artistic programming, something important and valid and meaningful. Of course, the people who make these ads are in the business of persuasion, and so it is not exactly difficult for them to persuade us that ads matter. The businesses that rely on those ads will do likewise because if we don’t see advertisements as some sort of creative entertainment, we might remember what they actually are.
Television commercials – and by television, I’m including whatever online services also run these ads – are nothing more than an intrusion from the modern-day equivalent of a door-to-door salesman interrupting your dinner in order to sell you something that you neither want nor need. They appear during the programme that we are trying to watch three or four times an hour for five minutes or more at a time, breaking up the narrative structure of the thing we are interested in. We might be watching a dark, emotive, moving, gripping, tension-filled story, only for several minutes of loud (usually louder than the actual show, and no, you are not imagining that) and bright bullshit that is going to remove you from the involvement that you’d been building with the story. I’m fascinated by people who will be outraged at someone glancing at their phone to check the time in a cinema yet think that 15-20 minutes of commercial breaks shoved in the middle of a TV programme is just fine.
At least once upon a time, programming made for commercial TV had ad breaks built in – the ads were scheduled within the narrative of a show. Now, on channels that show old movies or TV shows, they are crowbarred in at seemingly random moments. Are we midway through an important scene? Too bad if it clashes with a commercial break schedule. I’ve seen lines of dialogue cut in half by ad breaks that are presumably automated to appear at specific times and to hell with what is actually being shown.
TV is bad – YouTube is worse. Like many people, I’ve had to buckle under the ‘remove your ad blocker or be cut off’ threats (for now) and so am marvelling at just how awful YouTube advertising is – five-minute videos having ads crowbarred into the middle of them, unskippable ads that go on for ages and inappropriate commercials for the content. As others have pointed out, it all seems very desperate and misguided, because if someone is using an ad blocker, then they are not very likely to respond positively to any ad that they are now forced to watch. I’m aware that YouTube is a commercial service and that we’ve all become very spoiled at being able to watch so much for free. But there is a way to serve ads that is not disruptive and respects the viewer – and this isn’t happening.
Treating Christmas ads as though they matter – as though they are cultural touchstones, something that we eagerly anticipate the launch of and are ‘better than the actual shows’ (a statement that suggests that people should perhaps reassess what they are watching) – rather than as a necessary evil on non-subscription services, a chance to visit the toilet, make a cup of tea, check your emails or talk to your family while the TV is on mute for a few minutes is the result of social manipulation for several decades. I don’t doubt that old TV ads have a certain historical significance and amusement level, simply as reflections of the time. But the idea that modern TV ads are entertainment in their own right is ludicrous. We have been manipulated into believing this because it means that we then won’t question why there are so many of them or why they are increasingly so long.
Christmas ads are designed with the sole intention of provoking people into believing that the irrelevant is important and that a Marks & Spencer commercial is somehow as much a part of the season as loud jumpers, mince pies, mistletoe and family arguments on Christmas Day. These ads are nothing more than crass commercialism aimed at boosting the profits of all involved by any means necessary – and what could be less a part of the traditional Christmas spirit than that?
DAVID FLINT
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Commercial advertising — especially at Xmas — can be a useful barometer, not of what’s actually important, but of what these virtue-signalling goons would like us to believe is.
I tend to avoid watching much on ‘live’ TV so I avoid ads as, for the odd program I do watch with them I switch away from the channel to something else for the 5 minutes or so. It’s no less disruptive.
But the worst I’ve witnessed so far is Freevee, tried watching something on there once, within a minute of the program starting it stopped for a lengthy ad break. I stopped watching at that point and haven’t bothered since.
Youtube I only tend to use if I’m stuck in a game and need a clue how to proceed, so a couple of ads aren’t an issue. Couldn’t imagine watching anything lengthy on there though.
I guess that Freevee and the like are not subject to the minimal OFCM rules regarding ad breaks and so can shove as many in as they see fit. There is no escape unless you want to commit to a subscription – which seems excessive for a service that might only have one or two things that you are interested in.
With regard to the latest Youtube ads, search for ‘freetube’ which is essentially a Youtube clone but with no ads at all. It’s also open source, which is always an added benefit of course.
There is always a way…