Smile and buy, smile and buy

After years of hav­ing advert­ising pushed at me dur­ing almost every wak­ing minute, and try­ing to deny that it affects me in any way what­so­ever, I finally have to own up to a dis­turb­ing tal­ent for spot­ting those stand­ard pho­to­graphic images that accom­pany advert­ise­ments time and time again. And again.

For instance, we’re all famil­iar with the men in pants advert­ise­ments (or, if you like, those pic­tures that have become known as the ‘home shop­ping cata­logue shots’). Two men, mus­ter­ing everything within their macho expres­sions in order to look as defi­antly non-homoerotic as they can, stand next to each other in noth­ing but their pants, whilst one of them nar­rows his eyes and points at some­thing in the middle distance.

Since these two strap­ping and manly blokes — not gay, remem­ber, def­in­itely not gay — are stand­ing out in the middle of the open coun­tryside, the one with his hand in the air is prob­ably point­ing towards that woman stand­ing a few feet away on the pub­lic foot­path, as she screams in hor­ror at the sight of two men in noth­ing but their under­wear pos­ing in a field next to a herd of cows. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?

Then, this even­ing, as I was yet again mulling over the thorny issue of whether to get broad­band at home (and no, I still haven’t decided), I happened upon a pho­to­graph on the Pipex site. It was another case of instant recog­ni­tion, because it was the kind of image that I’ve seen a thou­sand times before: a woman smil­ing brightly in the fore­ground, whilst two less col­our­ful fig­ures lurk in the shad­ows eye­ing her with immense sus­pi­cion, and pos­sibly a little jealousy.

Those people — and in the Pipex photo I’m par­tic­u­larly think­ing of the man who is rub­bing his chin thought­fully — are obvi­ously whis­per­ing to each other, “Hmm, what’s her secret? Why is she so smi­ley and happy, but we look so dull and miserable?”

Nor­mally, of course, the reason for her annoy­ing jol­lity would be the arti­fi­cial scent of the Impulse body spray that she’s recently squir­ted onto her­self, or the fact that she’s wear­ing new for­mula super-absorbent Body­form, or even that she’s got a won­der­ful new ring of con­fid­ence. But no, in this case, she’s beam­ing so radi­antly because she’s got broad­band whilst, pre­sum­ably, the people behind her are still con­nect­ing to the inter­net via their slow, creak­ing dial-up con­nec­tions. What sad, mean­ing­less, empty little lives they must lead.

It would, how­ever, be entirely pos­sible to copy this pic­ture and use it to sell almost any­thing you want.

“Why is she look­ing so pleased with herself?”

“Well, she has Hellman’s may­on­naise in her sand­wiches, whereas we’ve only got stale bread with a thin slither­ing of pea­nut butter.”

Or maybe:

“Why is she always smil­ing in that infuri­at­ing way?”

“It’s because she’s got the love of the Lord Jesus Christ in her life, whereas we’re just good-for-nothing hea­thens who are going to burn in hell for eternity.”

Or even:

“Have you noticed her irrit­at­ing cheesy grin?”

“Yes, and do you know the reason for it? It’s because she’s got broad­band, so now she can down­load movie files ten times faster from that dodgy Romanian web­site that we’ve been try­ing to access unsuc­cess­fully from work.”

Proof that there’s noth­ing new in advert­ising, then.