RANT TIME!Maybe it's because I've been immersing myself in films and writing lately, and I've become cut off from bullshit reality, or maybe it's just because of a certain mood overcoming me. Maybe it's because I've stopped taking my diazepam for reasons I can't seem to remember. Actually, I can't seem to remember anything about what's...
But whatever the cause, I have something in my sights for the first rant in a while, and the chance to, you know, live up to half of my blog's title.
So, yeah. Advertising.
I've had a lot of feelings about this subject for a while, but it really got my goat lately when I saw an advert on TV for the new Battlefield game. Battlefield, in case you're wondering is a series of mostly mutiplayer shoot-em-ups using real world weapons and shit, like grenades and medical people, and is mostly played by pinheads who have invented their own language of bizzare, obnoxious shorthand and general rape of the English language. Lol, wut a nooob, pwned...They sound a little like The Clangers. God, that was a weird show. What the fuck were pigs doing on the moon...
Anyway, this advert was very shiny and nice, and I would have enjoyed it hugely if I had the mute button on. I usually do. I find not having to listen sometimes helps TV seem less like drivel than it really is. But sadly, for whatever reason, I was using my ears (probably so I could hear the sex line numbers), and the music comes on, as tends to happen in adverts. I was a little confused when Jay-Z's song 99 Problems was used as it's soundtrack. I thought I'd dropped acid by mistake again.
Again, in case you're like me in the sense that you're a human backwater, Jay-Z is some kind of hugely rich rapper (not the kind you open to eat your ginsters disposables) with a similarly rich Latino baby momma who has a similar problem with spelling her name.
The song, from what I gather, is about how Jay Zhee (making an assumption here) is far better at women than most people, how he has lots of problems but not in the trouser department (not bowel related), and how he pities us. No, that is not a Mr T reference.
I have to bite the bull by the horns here, because my metaphors are rubbish and I'm worried about a word limit on Blogger. There's always a word limit. Everywhere. You even lose your voice after a while of just talking and talking and talking and talk...
WHY IS THIS SONG RELEVANT?
I'm no stickler for this sort of thing, I promise. Music and killing virtual people go hand in hand, I understand this...By the way, killing virtual people is fine, virtually killing people is not. It's attempted murder.
And I also understand that the lyrics don't neccesarily matter if the music itself goes well with the action on screen. Most people don't even listen to lyrics anyway. A song could be about grounding limestones and people would still listen, if it sounds good...Mind you rap is basically just talking in rythm...sometimes not even in rythm...50 Cent.
Point is, the music doesn't fit either!
There's no beat that suggests hard conflict and shitting out your lungs in the midst of a mustard gas attack, and the tone is not of shooting an Arabic man in his sternum. Three times.
You get fan made videos on this little website I sometimes frequent called YouTube, which tend to mash up footage of their killing frenzies (again, fine, because it's technically not real, although the other soldiers are actually virtual avatars for real people with similar aggressional and educational problems...philosophy, anyone?).
These videos are invariably terrible, less fun to watch then my childhood home videos. Most childhood home videos don't include Fred West masks, but that's not the point. They're terrible.
Which is fine, because they're harmless. You don't have to watch, and probably never will. When you see a link to a Saving Private Ryan video with Linkin Park songs, common sense prevails. How could that be good? Even if you are disturbed. I'm not. I don't know why you said that. I suppose all that shrapnel around would save on buying straight razors...
BUT THESE AREN'T ON TV!
This isn't the first time either. I remember a whiles back when another action game came out, called Assassin's Creed 2. It's about medieval guys and Templars and sneaking around, and basically being Solid Snake back in dem days when you took a shit out the window and died at the age of 30 from sneezing too hard.
A little like the 1960's...
Anyway, the trailer for this game I saw on the box had some kind of Urban Techno track, which again DIDN'T FIT THE TONE but also didn't SUIT THE TRAILER!
So why is this happening?
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!
Did they forget to make the real advert and remember while they were getting munchies an hour before the deadline? Then throw together some shit quickly and decided it sounded great because they were FUCKING HIGH?! I know I would have done something that stupid when I was munted, although I wasn't being paid. Oh green dragon, what yearnful times we shared...
Anyway, there is a cause for this, two in fact. One of them is called precedent (not the black guy who runs America), the other is called laziness.
Anybody ever hear that song Mad World? It's a pretty blue piece of music by Tears for Fears, then redone by Gary Jules. It got famous again when it showed up at the end of Donnie Darko. Speaking of weed...that film didn't know whether it was New Year or New York...
Butt chances are that ALL OF YOU have heard it, and the reason is that it was used in the trailer for another game, a shoot em up in the future with bad guy heroes and weird alien creatures and the world ending and all that noise. It was called Beers of War, I think. For some freak reason I can't figure out, it worked really well, despite the song being not of the sort. The game sold really well, not because of the trailer purely, but it helped.
Ever since then, this has become a template to the advertising dudes who are supposed to be pretty creative. Supposedly. Apparently. Maybe. Ok, not at all.
You see, when something works, the option on how to follow it up is either to emulate it, or allow it to inspire you to think out of the box. And it's pretty clear which option was followed up. Lets just say they're still in that box, thinking away like crickets. Wait, do crickets think? Because I'm sure I once saw...
But this rationale goes deeeeeeeeeeeper. Deeper than I did the other night, when I...
Anyway, there's more to it than that. You have to remember that those in TV advertising, and often just TV in general, think that YOU are an idiot.
They have no respect for your intelligence, and no faith in your taste. They don't think you can stand watching a drama unless the people in it are are immaculate and gorgeous, and they don't think you can appreciate an advert unless it has one of your favourite songs in it. And these songs I mentioned are popular. Then again, so was Noel Edmonds, and look what happened to him. Twice. Buy bigger trousers, Noel. And shave. And die.
So by putting an inappropriate Jay-Z song into a trailer, it's actually a marker to get your attention. It's a way of letting you know that this is for you, this is YouTrailer. 'Buy this game if you like this song'.
A lack of taste means Good thing+Good thing=Reeeally awesome thing, man!
A third reason is that it works. It's uglier than a fight between a lion and a combine harvester, but it still works. Alot like the combine.
Copies are sold, and the advertisers make money.
LETS BUY A MONEY TREE!
The irony is that it costs more to buy the rights to a popular song, because of something called demand. They could have saved money by making an advert dat makes da sense! In fact, they already had one. I've seen some proper trailers on YouTube for the same game that uses its own music and they work. Unlike my liver, if my new skin colour is anything to go by...
But it doesn't end there. Keep digging, follow the money. No, the fact I'm called Deep Throat isn't of a sexual nature or suspicious at all...
The other problem with advertising is that it's misleading on purpose. This is really obvious when it comes to films, something I know a little about as a result of knowing little about anything else.
There's this film that I love called In Bruges. It's got a great witty script, sad story and some tearjerking and some general jerking and some Irishmen in Belgium and it's violent and it's a pretty dark drama with a little black comedy in the dialogue and it's got a midget and it's great.
But I wouldn't have guessed I'd appreciate it as much, if I'd gone just by the trailer. Or for that matter, or the cover art on the DVD for that matter (see right). It suddenly looks like the Guy Ritchie film that was never released because he was too busy with his crazy wife making movies about some guy and some girl and it's not real, and Ray Liotta shows up and he cries. Again. It doesn't look like the film I saw. Maybe I was on valium...
There are others too. I saw another little film, once. It was called The Girl Next Door, and I watched it entirely by accident. It's possible I had paralyzed myself when it came up on TV. Anyway, I remembered it's marketing making out that it was an American Pie style gross out wacky comedy with teenagers and drinking spunk and fucking baked goods.
But the reality was that it was just a nice, easy to digest (unlike the spunk...I'm told) slice of escapism with some humourous touches. It's not very deep, but it's definitely more respectable than Sean William Scott playing a human. Or is it William Sean Scott? Or Scott Sean William? Or maybe it's Sean Scott William. Or Wiliam Scott Sean...
Anyway, as I was saying the film didn't do too well, which isn't a surprise, even though it was released around the time those types of films were doing well. I was going to say 'those types of comedy', but I'd be stretching language to Val Kilmer's face proportions. Seriously, what happened to that guy's face? It looks like a balloon with Val Kilmer's features painted on it...
I digress.
This is where there's an odd paradox in the idea. Advertisers want to sell the film, and in the case of films its harder to bring viewers to the film than it is to bring the film to the viewers. So they edit it together with wacky music and suddenly it looks different. Throw in blurbs like "Hilarious - The Sun" or "I was left speechless - Roger Ebert" and it has gravitas, you HAVE to believe this is the kind of film you like. So they make huge bucks on cinema tickets by convincing movier goers that they're paying to see something else.
Or Scott William Sean...
But there's a flip side here! FLIP SIDE!!
The moment the audience realises they're watching a film about moral servitude, or fantasy escapism, or being stuck in sadness and in Japan with an increasingly melted Bill Murray, they'll get pissed off. They bitch to the their friends, to their work colleagues, to their families, to their customers, to their pets. What? Nobody else discusses movies with their dog? Bunch of fucking nutjobs!
Point is, word of mouth spreads faster than the clap in an Essex nighclub and the illusion is suddenly shattered. It's a totally flawed policy. It's like me telling my kids we're going to Disneyland, and they get excited because kids love merchandise, and so we get in the car but actually we go to the Western General Hospital and they watch me get a colonoscopy.
One of two things will happen: A) The film gets some credibility back, and gets the right audience. B) The film's reputation is destroyed, it sinks in the gross markets, and is ultimately forgotten about and mislabelled for years. Sadly, B is more common. The marketers end up causing the film to lose money because they chose a strategy due to fearing it would lose money. There's an expression that covers this. I think it's "Asshole! You fuck up my shit!". Is that Oscar Wilde? Because it sounds like Oscar Wilde...
I'd start having a go at TV adverts about products, but I'm tired and that wall over there talking with a Yonkers accent is getting on my nerves, I have to go bash his freaking skull.
But I'll just compare one of the most original and memorable adverts of all time, yes, the Guinness tick followed tock horses and surfers advert to the current 'memorable' commercials we have on the idiot box. Go Compare and Compare the Markets, borderline offensive charicatures. Because nothing says "buy my product" like "fuck you, immigrant!"
I suppose my point is that people in advertisement aren't trying any more, aren't bothered about having new ideas or getting creative in selling stuff, and frankly don't know what the fuck they're doing. If something works once, it must be milked. If something works for idiots, everyone's an idiot. If I don't stop typing, I'll black out and wake up in Aberdeen again. And I don't even fucking like Aberdeen!
This was a waste of everybody's time.
RANT OVER
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