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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2003-05-14, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, MAY 14, 2003. PAGE 5. Other Views AU ads, all the time Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century. - Marshall McLuhan Sure. Easy enough for McLuhan to say - he’s dead. He didn’t live to see Madonna shilling for a jeans manufacturer, Wayne Gretzky touting breakfast cereal and Jacques Villeneuve crawling out of the cockpit of his racing car, bedecked with more decals, banners, emblems and logos than Times Square on a Saturday night. Advertising. It’s everywhere. Ads pop up, unbidden, on my computer monitor when I’m reading my e-mail. The television screen now features a ‘crawl’ - a moving banner of ads that inches across the bottom of the screen while I’m watching The Simpsons. Remember when the boards along the sides of hockey rinks were tabla rasa white? Not anymore. They’re plastered with technicolour come-ons flogging everything from Coke to car mufflers. Don’t get me wrong -1 enjoy advertising. In a lot of magazines, it’s the best feature they’ve got. And the newspaper you’re holding in your hand wouldn’t exist without the ads that brighten (and pay for) all these leaden gray columns of type. But that’s old-style, ‘polite’ advertising. If you don’t like it, you can always turn the page. New style advertising is different. It’s invasive, insistent and obnoxious. Like a heat­ seeking missile ferreting out the quiet spaces and ad-free oases that we all used to have in our lives. Take, for instance, Captivate Network, Inc. That company is busily installing advertising videos in elevators all over North America. Yes, videos. Even if you close your eyes they’ll be in your ear. Even his friends are knocking Eves One barrier to Premier Ernie Eves winning an election is so many of his friends are mad at him. The Progressive Conservative premier keeps hearing he is no leader, lacks backbone, flip­ flops, betrays his cause, wastes money and has no vision of where he wants to go. These are all comments by some who normally support the Conservative party and not by opponents. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation, which advocates keeping down government spending and taxes, protested that Eves’s presentation of a budget in a makeshift TV studio instead of the legislature to evade scrutiny, was an affront to electors. They criticized him as fiercely as the opposition parties. When Eves postponed for a year his predecessor Mike Harris’s plan to cut income tax, the federation said he broke a trust and it could not have confidence he will keep campaign promises. After the provincial auditor found huge waste in government, the taxpayers’ group called it a nightmare and said the Tories should “remember this is not their money. It belongs to taxpayers.” The National Citizens Coalition, which expresses a conservative view, complained Eves betrayed Tories by acts including postponing tax cuts and urged members to hold off donations until he acts more like a conservative. News media which normally support the Tories in their editorials and speak for many Tories have been highly critical of Eves. The Toronto Sun asked, “Where was the premier while the SARS controversy was exploding around us?” and called him a wimp for his handling of the issue. Arthur Black It’s all part of a satanic new development in the advertising world called the Outernet Industry. As The Los Angeles Times puts it: “The industry operates on a simple principle: find out where consumers are gathering and put a screen in their face.” Elevators are a natural. So are doctors’ offices, commuter trains and subway cars. Watch for all-new, ad-video screens popping up in taxi cabs, public washrooms and the comer store. A couple of years ago, somebody erected a three-storey high movie screen at a British Columbia ferry terminal near Victoria. It carried electronic ads, giving, as a BC Ferry official explained to me, “passengers waiting in their cars something to look at.” It was a very large screen, making it somewhat difficult to take in the other viewing options — snow-capped mountains, sailboats, the Pacific ocean and bald eagles performing aerial ballets with cormorants, gulls and crows. What kind of a demented mind would substitute an electronic billboard for the wonders of nature? The kind of mind that could make this statement — which came from the lips of the president of an outernet firm: “This (kind of advertising) is good for people. If you’re standing in line waiting for a Big Mac and fries, you’ve got nothing else to do.” The hell I don’t, sir. I’ve got thoughts to Eric Dowd From Queen’s Park The newspaper said Eves “miscalculated badly when he delivered his budget in a factory instead of the legislature.” And, when Eves explained his party had difficulty communicating, The Sun suggested “when a party is experiencing a failure to cofnmunicate, it usually starts at the top.” One Sun columnist said Eves is scattered and undisciplined and lacks an over-arching vision of where he wants to take the province and “the majority of Tory supporters yearn for a time when they knew who their leader was and what he stood for.” Another said Eves risks defeat because he has alienated the Tories’ core vote by acts such as delaying tax cuts and abandoning plans to privatize the hydro transmission network and allow hydro rates to be set by the marketplace. Instead he is providing taxpayer subsidies to keep them artificially low, which could discourage building new generating facilities and cause a power shortage. A third declared “voters are embarrassed. We want our man to be more like his mentor, Mike Harris, who had an agenda and stuck to it.” A fourth Sun columnist found, most ominous of all, The Toronto Star, which mostly supports the Liberals, “seems to think, tunes to whistle and a dog-eared Elmore Leonard paperback in my pocket to catch up on. I’ve got gum to chew, people to watch and thumbs to twiddle, if need be. Which is all well and noble, but it won’t stop the outernet blitzkreigers from invading our private spaces. What can we do about it? In the spirit of the environmental protection mantra “Think globally, act locally”, I offer my personal Anacin Offensive. Many, many years ago there was an ad on TV for Anacin headache tablets. It featured a cutaway cartoon human head containing three compartments which showed a pounding hammer, a jagged lightning bolt and some other graphic display of mental pain. It wasn’t the most obnoxious TV ad I’ve ever seen, but they played the damned thing over and over and over - until I started getting headaches from watching the ad. By way of counter-attack I resolved that I would never, ever, buy, borrow or beg Anacin tablets for the relief of pain. And for the past three decades I haven’t — even in the wake of vicious hangovers, desperate flu bouts and migraines the size of P.E.I. I’ll take ASA, 222s, Excedrin - anything but Anacin. A small retaliation, but mine own. So that's my advice. Choose one product the advertising for which really annoys you and resolve never to buy it. More important, write to the company and tell them what you’re doing and why. The premise is simple enough. Why are they hitting us over the head with ads? To make us buy their products. How can we hurt them most? By not buying those products. To paraphrase the Nike ad: Just Don’t Do It. approve of Eves and this is a reason for Conservatives to start worrying.” The National Post, normally pro-Tory, complained Eves “reverses any government policy about which 50 per cent plus one of Ontarians express even the mildest concern.” It called Eves spineless for abandoning selling the hydro transmission network and refusing to le.t the marketplace set hydro rates. The Post said Eves is governed by polls and “unlike Harris, who was motivated by his own convictions, Eves’s only goal is to squeak through the next election. Whether he does or not, Ontarians will be feeling the economic effects of his weak-kneed decisions for many years to come.” One Post columnist predicted direly that Eves will not last long as premier, but will be remembered because his policies on hydro will bring about “the worst fiscal catastrophe in Canadian history.” The Globe and Mail, which supported Harris in the 1999 election, accused Eves of not being a leader on SARS and doing little to restore confidence, ease apprehension, dispel misconceptions and raise the spirits of residents and healthcare workers. Most of these critics of Eves probably will discover on balance they have more in common with Eves’s party than others in an election, but they may not come back to the fold with the passion they had before. Final Thought There is nothing we cannot live down, rise above, and overcome. - Ella Wheeler Wilcox Bonnie Gropp The short of it Our uniqueness You might say it’s a puzzle for people living in Huron County as to why anyone would choose to live elsewhere. We live in a picture-perfect setting. Our air is relatively clean. And within an hour or less we can attend just about anything, from a nature walk to a cultural event. Yet, our downtowns are emptying, a detrimental condition made highly visible by vacant storefronts. Our young people run off to the big cities for cosmopolitan opportunities, or find responsibility-free, relatively well-paid employment in factories. In Brussels, a group of merchants are looking at ways to improve, if nothing else, the esthetics of the downtown core. Known for its architecture, it would seem the most positive step that could be taken is to give some of those glorious buildings new life. Blyth is taking an even more aggressive approach. A committee of volunteers has formed to look for ways to revive the downtown, to fill the stores and make the community a must-visit destination. At their meeting, the value of this area was brought up several times. It is a long way from a sow’s ear that they are starting with to create the silk purse. But, in order to survive in the times of big box stores, it is uniqueness that must be discovered and highlighted. Huron County is already a wonderfully unique place. Home to a glorious lake, two summer theatres, museums and galleries and examples of recreational facilities which are second to none, it is best exemplified by a rural countryside which not only sustains the number one industry, but is unlike anything they have in large urban centres. Two amusing anecdotes were shared at the Blyth meetirg of Toronto perceptions of the country. A life-long GTA woman remarked on her pleasing drive to Guelph. It was, she said, so pastoral. Nothing like the 401 to offer the best in country viewing. A copy writer from Toronto did an ad enticing people to come to Huron to see, among other things, its blacksmith shops. Asked why he thought we had any of those, he responded that it was, after all, a farming area. The resident agreed, adding, however, that it is a 21st century farming area. I would not have believed these stories if it weren’t that with children living in Toronto I have met people with the similar perceptions. One young man, who has heard my daughter talk about coming from a village surrounded by countryside asked, while driving in Kitchener, if this town resembled where she grew up. Obviously we can hardly wait for him to visit Brussels. One thing that makes Huron stand out from a lot of places, is that we are essentially a city with a landscape. We pretty much have it all. And it takes us no longer to arrive at any destination in the county than it does for most people in Toronto to get from one point in the city to another, thanks to clogged streets and transit waits. A good number of lifelong Torontonians don’t know anything exists beyond the GTA borders. Just as we cannot discount the charm of a city without venturing into, and truly experiencing the lifestyle, urbanites need to spend some time out in the country. We are unique. The trick is to make them realize it. To do so, as they noted at the Blyth meeting, will take creativity. Find the carrot, dangle it then let them discover what they’ve been missing.