Ignorance fuels gutter instincts

The picture is of the rear end of a bull. The focal point is the pendulous equipment from which he derives his bullishness. The headline reads: “If you eat burgers, here’s a couple of half-pounders you might recognise.”

The next picture is of a man in his underpants. The focal point is a bulge that the bull might envy. The headline reads: “Girls, can we tempt you to a package holiday?”

What do these two ads – the first for the Vegetarian Society, the second for Club 18-30 holidays – have in common, apart from their self-evident coarseness? The answer is they are both prime examples of the fashionable genre known as in-your-face advertising.

Some find the trend disturbing. The Independent Television Commission, for example, has made plain its unease about what it describes as “aggressive, edgy” advertising. But why is it happening? How is it that an industry, which not so long ago was known, and sometimes feared, for its subtle, mesmeric arts of persuasion, now addresses its audience in the language and tone of a builder’s labourer caught mid-shovel by a leggy distraction?

The most favoured explanation is that advertising is afflicted by a frenzied post-Thatcher desperation. Recession translated competitive commercial activity into outright aggression and the old rules of engagement count for nothing. In the words of one commentator: “The choice of media is so much greater these days. You’ve got to shout louder to be heard.”

Another says: “The public is being bombarded with so much advertising that companies are more and more willing to push at the boundaries of what is considered acceptable in order to grab attention.”

Frankly, that won’t wash. Twenty years ago, advertisers calculated that each of us was bombarded daily by thousands of commercial images and messages. But the response was not to resort to crude exhibitionism. So what is different about today? As soon as one asks the question, it leads to another, and then another. And there are really no answers, apart from the gloomy reflection that the more things change, the worse they get.

Twenty years ago, advertising was an industry under threat. A Labour Government was in office, and the liberal-left distrust of commercial activity in general, and of its most conspicuous face, advertising, in particular, was the prevailing orthodoxy. So advertisers trod warily and there was a continuous determined campaign to defend voluntary self-regulation lest it be replaced by something more oppressive. But was it simply a fear of authority that dissuaded the advertising practitioners of an earlier generation from “shouting louder”?

I cannot imagine that David Ogilvy, Winston Fletcher, David Berstein, Peter Marsh, Ronnie Kirkwood, Barry Day, or Jeremy Bullmore would have been entirely at ease with the cor-what-a-lovely-pair school of commercial promotion.

So, are today’s newer, younger admen and women less cultivated than their predecessors?

There is evidence to suggest that, through no fault of their own, they might be. State education has failed an entire generation and many university graduates are said to be unable to spell or punctuate. The author AN Wilson says he gave up his career as an Oxford don when he discovered that one student was unaware of alphabetical order and could not therefore use a dictionary. He did not say whether she later went into advertising. But does a lack of education necessarily imply a lack of taste?

Whether an earlier generation likes it or not (and for the most part it does not), to focus on a bull’s testicles and describe them as half-pounders is a creative achievement.

Today’s young advertising hotshots are addressing their own generation. For a world that is blissfully free of ancient taboos, coyness, modesty, and restraint, bourgeois hang-ups about good taste will inevitably appear doltish and moronic to fuddy-duddies. That is their misfortune.

Before averting one’s eyes, and those of one’s children, from an improbably filled pair of boxer shorts, it is as well to remember that Club 18-30 does not seek the custom of a refined audience. So does admass mean worse?

Given that compulsory education has so lamentably failed to achieve the aspirations of its founders, the answer is probably yes. But not even its most devoted adherents claimed that compulsory schooling could create a population of aesthetes. Greater distribution of wealth combined with the iron law which dictates that most people will always be drawn to the least demanding of pleasures, has meant that the masses have found their voice not through the classroom but through their pockets. It is a distinctive voice.

The contemporary men’s magazine, Loaded, which has a circulation of 175,000, is produced, so we are told, in an editorial office that “stinks of beer and sick”. Interesting to reflect that in an infinitely less hygienic age, when Dr Johnson penned his articles for The Rambler and Addison wrote for the Spectator, their surroundings were almost certainly more agreeable than those of the belletrists at Loaded two hundred years on.

The difference, however, is that in the Eighteenth century, the writing and reading of periodicals was confined to a cultured, literate few. The poor were too ignorant to read. The rich admass of today can read, but has retained its invincible ignorance and is addressed from halls of vomit.