Keep on Dreaming

I’ve been working on multimedia for more than six years now. I love my job and still really passionate about it. Nevertheless for quite sometime now, I’ve been very thirsty of knowledge in promotions and advertising world, especially TV commercials. We are all influenced to some degree by advertisement and other forms of promotion. From the more conventional way of radio and television ad, to the more-shall we say-‘annoying’ type like telemarketer or even spamming, scamming, and fraud.

As the new millennium looms, we are experiencing perhaps the most vigorous and revolutionary changes of any era in the history of marketing, as well as advertising and promotion. These changes are being driven by advances in technology and developments that have led to the swift growth of communications through interactive media, particularly the internet.

It has been an integral part of our social and economic systems, a vital infrastructure for both consumer and producer/businesses/organizations. We surely remember during the election period, our elite politicians competing each other to gain as much as listener and audience, from corny banner, cheesy t-shirt, to a complex scheme of promotional tool like targeting internet community and full blown ‘road blocking’ spot in every TV channel. Subconsciously when we vote we are somehow affected by it, we probably remember how one goofy looking elderly woman said how much she adore SBY for his good looks in one particular ad.

Not everyone though is sold on the value of advertisement. Some might argue that most ads is more propaganda than information; it creates needs and faults we never really knew we had. Ads suggest that kids won’t succeed without a computer, that our body should be leaner, our faces younger, flak and pimple free. Some ads even more sultry and lewd to the point of rather offensive and made us blush. I don’t want to point any finger but you probably had one or two in your mind.

Ads on occasion can be tasteless, irritating, boring, obnoxious, and so on. Don’t you ever feel like you want to throw your book to the TV, when some noisy little kid with excessively fake happy face repeating her self three times about some sort of wafer thingies? Several studies show that more than two third respondents reported feeling offended by advertising at least sometimes.

Advertising also creates and encouraging commercialism, materialism, manipulating us to buy things we do not really want or need, encouraging the act of spending and together with the bombardment of mass media somehow responsible to a society more money oriented and corrupting our values in life, something amusingly put forward by Fight Club with its psychobabble about ‘the things we own end up owning us’.

What I’ve written above though making advertising more challenging in the future. How rewarding it would be if I can just for once involve in a project to create an ad that both ethical and effective, especially if it’s an award winning one. Hopefully some CEO of a reputable agency read this and give me a call, he he... Well, there’s no fault in keep on dreaming, right?