Nike, FCUK, Rolling Stones...

How was my day?

In the words of the Beatles: just another day. I never knew I led such an exciting life until I didn't.

I used to work in advertising. Doesn’t that sound glamorous? Of course the advertising that I worked in for most of my life wasn’t very glamorous at all. Directories are directories and can be quite mundane, but looking back on it now and compared to what has been my life since, it was pretty exciting most of the time.

Shame it had to change, but then its just another symptom of the way technology is changing the way we receive our advertising information. I’m not going to go into the wibbley-wobbley-web thing or viral videos but my belief is that anything nice and tangible (like paper) has been on its outway for a while now (nice new word invented there).

Today advertising is all about hard data, gathered and analysed and kicked out as stats, with hardly a Toulouse Lautrec in sight.

So much data is collected these days that in general you can get it to read any way you like - and if it doesn't read that way then just keep collecting until it does. Supermarkets target us based around buying patterns taken from loyalty cards, and companies push advertising after sneaking a look at where you’ve been surfing or what comment you made on that blog you were reading.

And no... I’m not going to go down the Big Brother cul-de-sac.

Advertising used to be so clean. How I loved those grimy posters that were stuck up everywhere, and the wind-torn billboards, and the glossy ads in magazines, and dirty hand-making newspapers (good for only a day) and good old yellow pages (good for a year).

Particularly good old yellow pages.

How long before they are all crumpled memories I wonder, like enamel signs and neon lights - all replaced by high tech alternatives? How soon before all advertising is either uploaded on hand held screens or holograms projected into the very streets that we walk along and we become just extras in someone else’s commercial?

How long before consumer and product are indistinguishable, or are we there already as people become living mannequins for brand and hype? We can’t be far away from clothes that interact with the wibbley-wobbley-web – And will we get free T-shirts as long as we click the ‘allow advertising button’ button – And will that make us all sandwich board hawkers, or are we that already – Nike, FCUK, Rolling Stones?