One of my pet hates of late is manipulative advertising. Without fail every summer vacation sees a torrent of crafty businessmen taking way too much advantage of the bonuses and savings people have worked so hard for. I’d imagine that the average Joe's thought process over the festive season would be something like this:
“Wow! This product is useless and doesn’t make sense at all, but it’s Christmas and I have bit of extra cash to throw around so what the hell…BUY BUY BUY”.
Staring ashamedly away from the screen aren’t you. Don’t feel bad, I’m guilty of thinking the exact same way, in fact I go so far as to save up and be über conservative over the duration of the year just so I can go extra AWOL over summer and spooge on random useless things I would never dream of buying at any other point in the year. For me December is the only period I don’t feel bad about buying Computer games and techy stuff like RAM, graphics cards and copper heat pipe cooling (yes, I am indeed a Nerdbob-geeky-pants). Why don’t I feel bad about it? Because of all the friggin manipulative advertising!!! Christmas special catalogs from every department store litter the streets and jam our postboxes to capacity. Bargains never seen before and NEVER TO BE REPEATED must be taken advantage off. Kids running through the streets shouting ‘Ayoba!’ on their way to the cellphone shops to literally spend their vacation allowances on discounted AIR!
What the hell is AYOBA in any case? I see and hear it everywhere but still don’t know what it is. As far as I can see it’s just some random word with an exclamation mark behind it. Vodacom just spent millions inventing a word then put it on all their adverts to enlighten the masses hoping to achieve…-BLANK- (this is the bit I can’t make sense of) … so more people buy their product. Have we, the most advanced species in the known universe, fallen so far that these brainless sheep tactics actually have an effect on us?
AARGH!
I’ll leave you with this advert as a classic example of what I mean.
Drink Moet, It’s your best chance to make jolly with Scarlet Johansson. PS: She may even touch your winky ;)
