‘Advertising is the cave art of the 20th century’, Marshall McLuhan said. Advertisings are mythical depictions of hunting and gathering rituals, that don’t take place on some stretched savanna, but in supermarkets and shopping malls. Through advanced profiles and content management systems ads can nowadays be targeted to select audiences.
Since a while, we – the good people of Next Nature – have been experimenting with Google Ads on our blog. Not so much out of commercial intentions (as they only pay our semi-annual editors dinner), but out of a perversely optimistic fascination with perhaps the strongest storytelling and myth-making genre of our time. We find the occasional and random alignment of editorial and commercial content fascinating and research-worthy. John Weeks, a critical reader, spotted a nice example of a talking back Google Ad underneath the Plastic Bird post.
If we would observe advertising and its symbolic overload from a Next Nature perspective, it becomes different, maybe even appealing. It would be a new species that might wants to establish a relation with you. Your Google Ads wish you a good morning, the Calvin Klein ad shows your girlfriend in your underpants and on television would be a commercial for yourgrannies apple pie! I am wondering what our caves would look like by then.
Tim
I once made a website on a terrorist architecture group. One of their imagined actions was directed at gated communities. It involved placing another fence around the gated communities to keep the inhabitants out of our world. Google Ads advertised fence cutting equipment alongside...
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