Smoking And Nature, Brilliant!

Friday, January 28, 2005

This rant is brought to you by Flickr - click on the image for a larger view of the Japanese cigarette billboard discussed below.

So I posted this image of a cigarette ad in the Tokyo subway to my new favorite toy, Flickr, the photo-sharing and community website that's as addictive as crack laced with heroin, with a little note about how the prominent use of the color green was a conscious choice and I got this question from a passerby: "What effect does green have?" That prompted the four paragraph rant below, enjoy:

Green means nature, health, relaxation... everything that smoking is not! It has a very soothing effect on the picture, a calming tone. Green is not a color that annoys you and jumps to attention, like red or orange or even yellow.

I heard a funny piece on advertising once, I want to say it was by George Carlin, I can't remember. The gist of it was this: advertising is about lying. And not just lying, but telling the exact opposite of whatever the truth is. For example, what do you see when you see a TV commercial for airlines? Everything it's not for most of us: spacious seating, friendly attendants, tasty food, smiling passengers happy with their trip... you don't see the jerk seated in front of you lowering his seat into your lap and crushing you in place, the robotic attendants that have to deal with the rude flocks streaming in and out every day, the person next to you cranking open the window shade to blast you with blinding sunlight when it's the nighttime leg of a long flight and the cabin lights are dimmed to let people sleep and readjust their body rhythms, the nasty prison grub they dare to call food, the sloppy bathrooms you'd never use otherwise, etc. Flying was a magical and expensive thing to do before, now it's going the way of trains and buses. I still get nostalgic when I watch “North By Northwest” and see what travelling in style used to be like. All of this is an example of the kinds of things which marketing departments dare not show - the truth - and is an image they try to reverse. The problem is that you can't reverse something just by pretending it's not that way.

Maybe that's why the best advertisements actually tell the truth for a change. Here in the U.S., there's a very popular TV ad series called "The Truth" that shows what smoking is really like and I remember how shocking it was to finally see someone tell it like it is, even though the ads didn't have any new information. And there's an even more interesting trend lately - the products that work the best seem to get popular without any advertising at all and for some it's even a conscious choice to check out of the whole marketing rat race: Amazon, Google, Flickr, Blogger, etc. Quick, what's a better search engine, Google, Yahoo or MSN? Google. Which ones do you see ads for on TV? Yahoo, MSN. Some have even done their homework before discarding traditional advertising: Amazon did some test ads in major TV markets in the U.S. and didn't see any benefit whatsoever, so they yanked it, didn't go national and never repeated the mistake.

So it's not an accident - someone chose that patch of grass, laid out a model to relax on it, thought about how appealing all of this would look to stressed out city people rushing through the subway tunnels, all to achieve a desired effect.

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