I apologise to those that read this from out of town, this is an English centric post. There are two advertisements running at the moment that are more irritating than the standard drivel. Number one is the advert that involves teenagers droning their parents title in order to demand some clothing purchase. I won’t mention the company that the advertisement is for out of principle but I’m sure that you have seen it. I don’t understand why the advertisers think that this advertisement will tease me into using their service. Of course it is a clever advert and it calls to my inner conscious but all those kids make me want to do is punch them in the face.
If you deconstruct this advert what it says is that this is the company for you if you have horrible and demanding children and are a rubbish parent. “Demanding children? No backbone? Weak parent? Give in to everything with one simple call to us and you can be back to your Lambrini in no time”
The other one is not so so irritating as it is illogical. In this advertisement a young man is too stupid to work out that the ‘TV’ button on his new kindle will display the screen on the TV. To cope with his complete and utter incomprehension of basic device management he calls upon the magical new help function. Selecting this option puts him in touch with a young lady with a charming Irish accent who helps him without criticising his abject stupidity.
This is England, we don’t have English call centres, any help service will be outsourced. The reality is that when you press this button you will make contact with Manjita, a 16 year old Indian girl who can barely understand English. There will have to be seventeen steps of security, all completed with a person who can’t understand English. When you deal with Manjita by phone she will call herself Jane and pretend that she is in the same time zone. She will follow scripted small talk and do her very best to pretend that she is simply an incompetent English person, how will this work with a visual system? Will they have to build rooms that look English, will there have to be real time airbrushing? Let’s be honest here, if you can’t sort simple telephone support then why show us who we are talking to?
