Advertising saves lives.

I went to the Eagle Awards last night. It’s an advertising award dedicated to print only and apparently quite a big deal to win. Well, a big deal to people who work in advertising. To everyone else, it’s meaningless. Which is ironic since the point advertising is to seduce all those other people into buying whatever it is the advert is selling. And even more ironic is the fact that the award is judged by people who work in advertising and have been trained to see through the gimmicky techniques advertisers use to create the seduction in the first place. So, this must beg the question. Is it an award that celebrates advertising, or an award that celebrates advertisers? It is surely the latter.

And then to add to the dilemma, not only is this the case for 99% of advertising awards but 99% of the work that’s submitted into these awards never actually runs. And if it does, it runs once as a thumbnail in some completely random miniature publication, like the art director’s wife’s garage-studio yoga newsletter. Which means no one outside of the advertising fraternity is ever exposed to it. Essentially, the very people who it’s intended to seduce don’t even know it exists. And I assure you that any honest, self-respecting creative (as much of a contradiction as that may sound) will admit to this. So, this then begs a further question. What the fuck is the point?

What the fuck is the point of advertisers awarding themselves for work they’ve done that’s intended to sell products to the man on the street if he never even sees it? The more I think about it the more ridiculous it becomes. It’s like an Oscar being awarded to a director for a movie he created that no one other than those in the film industry ever saw. Or a Pulitzer being awarded to a writer for a book no one ever read.

The advertising community pats itself on the back time and time again with award after award after award for job after job after job that, theoretically, don’t actually exist. How fucked up is that? What difference are they making? It’s actually pathetic. And when you go to these award ceremonies, you see these ad geniuses milling around in their skinny black jeans acting as though their work is so mind-blowingly amazing that should a homeless child dying of kwashiorkor see and understand their ad, it would be as though the child had just received a life-saving injection of protein without even using a needle. Because after all, advertising saves lives.