Heard the one about...?

Have you heard the joke about the estate agent parking his Porsche outside his office or what about the traffic warden who made his girlfriend pregnant?

Plenty of professions become the butt of jokes and mostly it’s clear where such reputations come from. Sometimes it’s because the job itself is unpopular– like traffic wardens (surely no-one actually aspires to issue parking tickets?) – and other times it’s the way that profession behaves. Estate agents for example are considered charlatans by many, I suspect because they’re motivated by hard cash, which is never the best stimulus, I feel). Law is another career that people definitely aspire to join and I’d like to bet people’s reasons for wanting to become lawyers are often altruistic. In reality however, they’ve gained a shocking reputation for earning their livings out of promoting human dissension.

Something that has often struck me though is how those in the advertising industry have got off scot free from the teasing, leg pulling and the jibes. I’m not referring to small companies selling their own goods, who advertise to get us to notice them over their competitor: that seems like fair game to me. I’m talking about conglomerates - particularly agencies - with gargantuan budgets; the high end.

Not only do these big budgets strike me as somewhat distasteful, there’s something dishonest in the fact that the agencies don’t actually appear to be selling the items they promote. Instead they are selling something much more tenuous. Take a look at the adverts in any glossy magazine. Examine the expressions on the models’ faces: haughty, arrogant, conceited and proud are invariably the look. These people have something you ordinary mortals do not, suggest the advertisers. Their main purpose is to make us feel we too can be transformed into these enviable people if only we bought the products they promote.

And of course it won’t. You buy the pillar box red lipstick and you don’t get anything except the over bright lipstick that you’ll put in a drawer until it goes off. It won’t change anything about your life and yet that is exactly what we’re led to believe. Their aim is for us to feel inadequate.

Despite the fact that advertisers are all competing with one another, they compound each others’ messages. It isn’t the fact that skinny models are used in one campaign that makes adolescent girls at risk from eating disorders: it’s because ALL the big names are using skeletal models. The advertising companies might be trying to say use our product over that one, but essentially they are all suggesting that we can transform ourselves or our lives by buying into their messages. Because their messages are about lifestyles and glamour, rather than products, we’ll never be those people on the billboards; the advertisers will just move the goalposts so we can never attain the ‘look’. If we did achieve it, they wouldn’t be able to sell any more. It’s all based on undermining us.

It’s impossible not to notice in Thailand the enormous number of advertising billboards showing pictures of either Westerners or of luk kreung – mixed blood Thais. It’s utterly ludicrous on every level that beauty is judged by the colour of skin. It’s most stupid because in the West the opposite is true.

The last time I was in the UK I noticed a new development of luxury apartments being built. Outside the site they were advertising the apartments with a picture of a very beautiful half Asian woman and the back of a man of indeterminate ethnicity. Both were expensively dressed and she was looking directly at the camera with a haughty and unobtainable air. They weren’t selling the apartments by showing us what they were like inside, or listing the lovely high end contents they would fit. They were trying to sell the concept of a lifestyle, of glamour and wealth.

In Bangkok, Western-looking Asians are selling condos while in the UK, Asian-looking Westerners are doing the selling.

Can anyone else see that we’re being had?