Half-time between France and Brazil, and you're wondering whether to get another beer or have a pot of tea. You're getting to your feet when an image shrieks from the box in the corner: "don't make the tea! Wait 10 seconds! Watch me! Please!" You pause, you watch: the television ad strikes again. Never mind the football, this World Cup was a marathon adfeast, a penalty shoot-out between Nike and Adidas, Carlsberg and Guinness, along with every other super-mega-multi-national beer or car or even hair-care company known in our uniquely throwaway culture. Extraordinary the concentration of commerce, creativity, energy, and imagination - and all that off the field. Extraordinary how consumerism can be so damned persuasive. Some find it scary.
"There was a time when I thought the answer to all social problems was to blow up the transmission masts," says Fay Weldon, the former copywriter who created the slogan "go to work on an egg," currently locked in controversy over her new Channel 4 series Big Women. "Now it's too late; now they've got satellite and it's beaming down messages that are anti-aspirational at a human level but very aspirational at the let's-have-more-possessions level." Once, it was in order to condemn television advertising out of hand as something at best fluffy and at worst downright damaging. But if the economics of television itself sank those arguments, the sheer inventiveness and entertainment value of the very best ads made such objections seem pofaced.
Ads made smart television - their enemy was the remote control, so they had to. In the contest to keep you watching, they re-invented soundbites and soap operas, confessional secrets, and those slogans turned catchphrases you hear in the street. "Who cares, Habibi, they're gorgeous" became a come-on line for a whole generation, the first Irish TV slogan to catch the popular ear. The product was biscuits. "Papa? Nicole . . ." repositioned the Renault brand so effectively that its Clio unexpectedly became one of the faster selling small cars in the UK.
Television ads work as contemporary folklore. "It's grown into this amazing thing where you're selling image, not product," Weldon continues. "And these ads do enter into people's unconscious; it's a common dream experience, but it's not real." Created from the marriage of commerce and creativity, ads are ultimate want-me moments of convergence between the late-twentieth century Western world preoccupations of television and shopping. Like attention-seeking middle children, they're condemned to being needy, always greedy for praise and recognition, ever-destined to exist between two bigger siblings. "The best ads are planned by natural strategists who have a feel for how a brand should be positioned," reckons Eoghan Nolan, award-winning copywriter and joint creative director of McCann Erickson, who almost persuades me that the word "slogan" comes from the Irish "slua ghairm", meaning "battle cry". "People think it's all about writing slogans," he explains, "but that is a very small element in running a successful campaign. If an ad doesn't interest you, you're probably not part of the target market."
Many ads are sheer baloney, but the exceptions set the tone for mainstream television too. Always erring on the side of political and social conservatism, they take the temperature of popular culture in a way almost no other medium can. In the real world, for example, lifting the bar on San-Pro products, alias intimate hygiene, was probably the biggest taboo about women's bodies which shattered in the last decade: for televisual purposes, Irishwomen did not menstruate until the age of the Beef Tribunal. Now, even news programming tries to mimic the genre's narrative style and snappy, well-paced segments. So much so that their marketing messages increasingly govern mainstream television scheduling, guaranteeing revenue for programmes which come with a ring-fenced squadron of viewers, preferably those in the big-spending 18-35 bracket. A show like Countdown, for example, wins millions of viewers, but with an audience scattered between the ages of seven and 18, can't compete for revenue with Chris Evans' TFI Friday: only 1.5 million audience, yet each within the target group.
The potential power of advertisers to influence programming decisions is among the more sinister trends of the future. But the marketing pay-back can cut both ways. Guinness's decision to use the GAA hurling championships as its new campaign vehicle helps reposition and promote one of the world's most beautiful and least acknowledged sports. That conflation made the World Cup tournament a display of global gluttony, with more brands than you'd ever heard of desperate to market their names on the back of football's image. Complex games of consumer footsie between celebrities and commodities began to play right through the programmes and across the ad breaks too - Des Lynam featured in ads for plant food and deodorant, Alessandro Del Piero's boots were set in concrete and exhibited like paintings in an art gallery, the Brazilian football team made millions before they played their first match. I never want to see those brands again. But that may not matter. Their intent is memorability, and if that outcome is satisfied, the ad has achieved a major part of objective.
The new age of ads started in the sixties, when agency directors like the legendary Bill Burnback - his image of the very first Volkswagen Beetle made it the car of the decade - switched the game from simple product-based demonstrate-and-sell expositions into the kind of sophisticated lifestyle/image package which persists today.
"Good ads are about creating feelings and attitudes towards the brand in the consumer's mind," says Lindsay McMurdo of London-based Ogilvie and Mather, who recently launched the new Impulse ad, where a gay man can't resist the fragrance but passes up the girl. In such moments is advertising history made. Pundits talk television ads the way literature professors discuss poetry - the poles of memory and desire, the sheer artistry in making yet another common-or garden commodity become a lifestyle essential. For ads don't peddle products, given that products hardly differ one from the other. They sell dreams. And the dreams are always positive. No famine, no bad news, no pain. Ads let reality shed its democratic deficits, generating a world where consumption is its own reward. Good ads are enthralling, and that's precisely the point. Once you become in thrall to the image they peddle, you're part of a new age feudal system designed to make you take sides. At stake is how well or badly you play the lifestyle game, how much attitude you can afford to show. Irish-made TV ads already occupy approximately 10 per cent of the advertising agencies' income here, with an upwardly mobile spend increasing faster than the consumer price index, and set to rise further with the advent of TV3. 1997 figures value it at over £102 million.
Economies of scale restrict home-grown ads from the start: shoots cost an average of £35,000 per day, budgets total hundreds of thousands less than the mid-five-figure average available in the UK and rest of Europe. Eoghan Nolan forecasts that the trend towards global markets will increasingly favour "the Ben Hur epic style which can travel, rather than the simple strong idea."
But Irish agencies can and do compete in the global market, with the Helme Partnership winning the Miller Beer commercials Creative account for all Europe, and Arks running the highly successful Guinness campaigns, An- ticipation and Surfer. McCann Erickson recently won back the Yoplait campaign from a UK firm. Alongside predictable factors like budget and client base come unexpected features. You can't crack jokes so easily in a homegrown ad, or rely on humour as much as you may want. "Jokes grow stale very quickly," says Ian Fox, chief executive of the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland. "And with a shelf-life of up to two years, as against perhaps six months at most in the UK, the agencies can't always afford to crack them." While every other "ism" falls apart at the seams, advertising's constant spinning of consumerism seems set to make that ideology among the core cultural codes of the future, separating west from east, poor from rich, Nike-wearer from Adidas-supporter. "But ultimately it doesn't work because human beings are always more ingenious and more subtle than anyone supposes - we can turn off, " says Weldon. "Advertising's narratives are so intricate, so interwoven with Western society that I don't think much would be gained by stopping them; it's better than working out campaigns of war, after all."
