Double-checking my booked events last night, I was surprised to find I had double-booked. What a shame I had to choose!
I chose to see Dr Stuart Price's Micro-Ideology lecture, and I believe I chose correctly.
Though advertising has always interested me, I was initially at some disadvantage in understanding the lecture, finding myself a little out of my depth with some of the terminology. Once we got going into the subject proper, though, I learned quite a few advertising tricks neither I nor, most likely, most people would have stopped to notice before.
Most particularly the way that, nowadays, companies make an effort to appear benevolent and friendly towards us, more so than in older times. They talk about all the good they're doing, speak to us directly, tell us how to solve our problems - while manipulating the truth to make that good seem greater, to pose the very problems they solve. Not to mention the times when their slogans devolve into pure nonsense.
And yet all this was delivered with a cheerful matter-of-factness, and no great burden of cynicism. Just watch out the next time you notice a radio or TV show 'sponsored by' a company - doesn't that endorsement tacked onto the end in some way make the whole programme an advertisement?
Louella Pritchard
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