Rob's Blog

What I like about this beer advert, that I saw at the cinema last night, is that it’s an unashamed lifestyle advert. Drink our product and you too will get to hang out with beautiful people in the sun wearing hardly any clothes. The product being advertised is obscured until the end, so I kept waiting for the car crash and the drink-driving message, but no.

Update: The music is from a band called Billie The Vision and The Dancers. The song is called Summercat from the album I Was So Unpopular In School and Now They’re Giving Me This Beautiful Bicycle. All the band’s music is free to download, but if you like it you can donate. You get more of what you reward, after all. The songs are available in the excellent FLAC format, too. This is a business model I really hope can be successful. Perhaps doing the beer advert will bring the band lots of trade. I hope so.

They have done it again. This time, the Barclaycard contactless card is used from a roller coaster. In a world of PVRs, advertisers have to make adverts that people want to watch, and it shows.

I have one problem with contactless cards. The standard apparently doesn’t allow the reader to discriminate between cards. I used to leave my Oyster card in my wallet, but now my other contactless cards interfere with it, so I have to take it out.

Just saw an advert in which a woman complains about her stretch marks, which reminded me of this, which tickled me:

From Mitchell and Webb, this is a perfect satire that explains how we get adverts that try to blind us with pseudo-science and convince us we have problems we don’t have. I remember seeing it on TV over a year ago and was reminded of it when I saw a real advert for a toothbrush that had a tounge brushing appliance.

(Incidentally, this probably shouldn’t be on YouTube, but I can’t imagine it being so doing Mitchell and Webb anything but good.)

I tried to brush my tounge once. It made me gag.

A poster at the tube station advertises courses on Economics with Justice at something called School of Economic Science in London. Bleh.

The course attempts to show how principles of truth, love and service translate into policies for governments and economic planners and practical precepts for individual households and businesses.

Advice to students: don’t waste your time. Go and do a real course.

This is a poster advertising the Financial Times. The caption reads, “Business revolutionaries. Past, present and future.” Might not the FT be doing Richard Branson an injustice by associating him with a mass murderer?