My eyeballs! My searing eyeballs!

Roger Hislop

I seldom watch TV, but this weekend was different. I turned on, tuned in, and zoned out. Until the advert breaks. Not having watched in a while, I was stunned by the sheer number of ads for mobile tat. Ringtones, wallpapers, logos, the dross that seedy companies flog to pointless teens and even more pointless adults (at least the teens have their cluelessness as an excuse).

But watching the ads, identical in every way but the choice of jarring, eyeball-searing beachball colour, I realised that there is a sea change in TV as a visual medium.

TV ads came from the same world as cinema ads – it was fundamentally a motion picture medium, with concept and art direction that sees the small screen as a way to place footage of scenes that draw out our emotions, or create visual drama through powerful imagery with the intention of leaving a lasting impression. There have been infinite mediocre ads, many good, and some great – scenes that linger in pop culture for decades. The Duracell Bunny cling-clinging its way home to the tearful tot. The “not inside it’s on top” Cremora man. The Coca Cola Happiness Factory.

But mobile phone tat download ads are not from this world of storytelling and visual artistry. They are from a new world of advertising, one which was spawned from the hack ‘creative’ of Web banner ads. It’s advertising where the only creative driver is FLASHING! BRIGHT COLOURS! BOLD! MORE BRIGHT COLOURS! FLASH THEM! SEIZE THOSE EYEBALLS!

It’s hideous. It’s a creative rubbish tip. It works. The only metric that mobile tat firms care about is how downloads will peak when the ad flights. Get boobs! Get Brittney! Get love! Send “tat” to 3-50-50 now!

This kind of advertising has a bastard parentage in the grotesquely cheap, uniformly nasty and brutally utilitarian TV spots for the premium rate “party lines” that used to be flogged, non-stop, on late night Euro TV right back to the eighties. But they are the true spawn of the World Wide Web. Advertising that is nothing to do with emotion, very little to do with brand, everything to do with running the numbers, methodically calculating odds and percentages, and hitting the mobile tat suckers again and again and again.

They see the TV screen in the same as a Web banner placement: a piece of real estate a certain size and resolution, with a certain number of eyeballs to hit to make your numbers.

The great ad creatives of yore spin in their graves, and today’s ad agency droids agonise over whether to seize the poison cup of this kind of customer. Meanwhile, our TVs, which used to merely annoy us with ad breaks, now cause actual pain to our eyeballs, while giving us back nothing more rewarding than shouting text and machine-gun repetition of call-to-action trigger phrases.

Once, I hated the Omo “I nearly died!” lady. I loathed that goddam Vodacom meerkat. But at least I cared.

• 2008/08/13
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