Cold, Frankenstein and Grrr!

Dear Marketing People,

You need to know that your adverts tend to leave me cold at best. Starting to market Christmas the second that Hallowe’en is over (and sometimes before) is guaranteed to piss people off and, quite frankly, spoil the whole holiday for us because we are so sick of it by the time it comes around. I realise that you have to start thinking about these things in July, but there really is no reason to inflict your pain on the rest of us. It’s getting so that I almost expect Hallowe’en outfits to include Santa suits. (No, don’t get any ideas!)

Now let’s look at the content. Clearly swathes of people  in your industry have been lobotomised*. There really is no other reason why using a song about stalking to sell perfume might be considered appropriate. Mind you, some of your music choices make a perverse kind of sense. For example, I can see that a woman+a leopard+opium = likely death and therefore a Requiem. Was this what you were trying to convey? I could probably list a few more such faux pas, but I have to concentrate really hard to force myself to notice adverts at all (I’m rather good at filtering them out) and I really can’t be bothered.

While we’re on the subject of music, you should know that no amount of breathy females crucifying good songs by whining them slowly, acapella or otherwise, is going to make my buy the stuff in your ad. In fact, it is liable to piss me off so much that I will never shop there or buy whatever it is again, so please stop it. Oh, and using similarly leaden versions of otherwise jolly music is not going to guilt me into donating to anyone’s charity either.

*The other giveaway is how absurdly excited you can get about such mundane items as toothpaste and shampoo. I mean, really?

I do market research surveys (in a purely mercenary way, not out of any sort of interest) and I’m frequently at a loss how to respond to questions that want to know how I think some everyday product is going to make me feel before I’ve tried it (on an effective scale of ‘thrilled’ to ‘wetting my pants with excitement’) without offering the option of “nothing at all”. FFS people, get a grip – only you wet your pants with excitement over yoghurt and washing powder and all the stuff that the rest of us just use and don’t really give much thought to, let alone get emotional epiphanies over. I realise that this revelation will probably make your life purpose utterly futile and meaningless, but…well…you could always get a life.

So, please, just stop it. OK? As the image above points out, it’s all pointless anyway, so just stop annoying people.