Rant ads

I know I talk about ads quite often. I just find them fascinating. To me, most commercials aren't about selling product. They are more a reflection on the time and place and values of the time and place where the commercial is produced. I rarely see commercials apart from their societal message, if you will.
For example, there is an ad out for Kokanee beer right now that makes me a little sad. It is filmed from a first person perspective and it shows a guy going through a couple of days in a fast forward time lapse. Everything he does in those two days is devoted to fun and his own self-interests. He goes out and skis and kayaks and bikes down a mountain and then goes to a party and wakes up the next morning with a young woman in his bed and then goes out and does all sorts of fantastic things, ending the night at another party full of pretty girls and he catches the eye of one of them, implying that he is going to try and pick her up next. All I can think when I see that ad is how empty a life like that would be and how pointless. It's not that I have anything against most of what he does - skiing can be fun, as can whitewater rafting and mountain biking. But this ad isn't selling beer so much as it is trying to sell a lifestyle, and, as I said, I find that lifestyle empty in the end. Maybe I have just known too many people who have nothing in their life that really seems to matter - they just concentrate on working enough to fund their toys and that is all they care about. The ad is merely reflecting and helping to reinforce that state of mind. Canada and the US are two of the richest countries in the world, and sometimes I think we are also among the most dissatisfied.
Well, this got more depressing than I thought it would. Maybe working in retail has made me more sensitive to how pointless much of the wants of this world are. The amount of money and energy spent on things makes me sad.
So on a bit more of an upbeat note...okay, that's a lie. It's more of a funny/grumpy old man note. The current ads for PCs amuse me. They show young kids, four to six years old, doing things that sound complicated. They are trying to say that PCs are so much easier than Macs (though they never actually mention Macs, just using the phrase "I'm a PC" brings to mind the Mac vs PC ads). However, the fact that a four year old can use the PC is not a measure of how easy the PC is to use as much as it is saying that when someone grows up with something and uses it from an early age, it becomes second nature. If those same kids were raised in a family of Mac users, they would find the Macs to be much more intuitive. I remember finding PCs odd to use at first because the few computers I had experience with when I was young were all Macs. But I have not used Macs much since then, so they are a bit odd (the whole 'one button mouse' thing is a little weird now). It shows that ads are less about informing about products and more about selling ideas.

Grasp the Nettle