For an education that kicks...

Commentary

1. This advertisement is silly! It says nothing about the university at all, unless they've got degrees in fashion engineering nowadays...
2. What does such a shoe have to do with Flinders University? You could hardly walk (especially around mountainous Flinders), let alone kick anything, in that shoe! The advertisement should read, "For an education that is impractical and uncomfortable..."
3. First they switch to a very conservative, beige colour scheme in 2008, now, in 2009, they're out with the crazy stilettos! Is there some kind of internal struggle going on in the marketing division?

Rating

POORNESS FACTOR 6/10

This advertisement doesn't offend the intellect so much...it is just ridiculously bush-league and reeks of forgotten deadlines! Somebody threw together some clip-art, some words and added a neat shadow and thought "that'll do!" Unfortunately it did - and now it graces "Bob" knows how many bus shelters. It's pedestrian-grade annoyingness, only slightly less so than this website.

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Advertising has long been famous for being idiotic, but I've been noticing some disturbing trends in the world around me lately. One is the general lack of thought put into the advertisements: this can result in anything from silly incongruity like in the image above, to incredible racism and sexism. It may just be that I notice it more these days, but I wonder if there is a feedback loop here.

If advertisements, plastered all over every surface and transmitted into our homes via TV, can change people's ideas about 'what goes', then this thoughtlessness should increase over time. The standards of the community are only modified by advertisements that slightly push the envelope of what is acceptable - an advertisement that completely offends will be quickly censored. There is a tendency to push this envelope in order to elicit emotional responses like shock, in order to get the attention of the audience. Eventually, all advertisers are pushing that envelope the same amount for long enough that the wider population are no longer shocked.

Not only does this mean that the advertisements can be a little more shocking next time, it also means the population from which the next generation of advertisers are drawn has a higher threshold for shock. The second of these points is most important because it allows the trend to exist without the existence of some malevolent scheme perpetrated by 'standardless' advertisers. It's likely that both of these things are happening in marketing departments, they just vary in their relative importance from organisation to organisation.

The increase in shock value of each generation of advertising is roughly the same, because the shock threshold of the community increases with each generation. However, to somebody who manages to hold onto their original standards, the advertising would appear to be getting more and more atrocious.

So that's my model, made of pure handwavium...it doesn't account for the influence of government, disaster and other things that might quickly and radically transform the way people think.