No Bits Per Second

This weekend I went to see "Curse of the Were-Rabbit" with Mrs. Kludge, my mother, and my sister's family. I thought it was pretty good, although what's with the current trend of Helena Bonham-Carter only appearing in voice form? Inevitably, there were adverts. There are now five sets of adverts you'll see at any cinema if you turn up early enough. First, you'll see the static adverts that the cinema displays while people are coming in and sitting down - you know, the "5 minutes from this theatre" style of advert - although these ads seem to be more for technical colleges than Indian restaurants nowadays. Next we have the advert for the cinema itself. In some way, these adverts are the most enraging - I don't know about you, but I don't need an advert to get to come to a cinema I'm already sitting in. Nothing that I want to do that can be achieved by simply sitting on my arse needs advertising. I don't see adverts for air, for instanc...

At GE, we've discovered an inexhaustible resource. A resource that we believe could help solve the problems of an energy hungry world. It's called imagination, or rather ecomagination. I don't know, it seems to me that GE's marketing block have already pretty much exhausted their imaginations - sorry, their ecomaginations - if this is the best they can come up with. What makes this particularly odd is that it's in The Economist . I'm not entirely sure who it is that GE are advertising to. If I can just play with my Venn diagrams for a bit here, the demographic appears to be the union of the following sets: Those who read The Economist Those who care about the environment Those unable to distinguish made-up words from genuine feeling and innovation I'm fairly sure that that limits the potential audience somewhat.

I have, for many years, used Lynx deodorant. Today, as my current aerosol ran out, I remembered that I made myself a promise a few weeks ago - a promise to never ever buy anything from Lynx ever again. This might actually require no action on my part. I'm a thirty-something man, and like many thirty-something men it is difficult for people outside my immediate family to work out what I might possibly want as a birthday present. So I end up with toiletries, which for men means gift-packs of shower-gel and deodorant. Given their position as brand-leaders in Britain, I am pretty much guaranteed to get given at least one more can of Lynx deodorant before I die. ...unless I'm quick about it. The reason is adverts. Now, I'll happily admit that there are a handful of adverts around at any given time that are actually bearable in some way - either they're actually funny, or actually clever, or (rarely) actually informative. But by and large, I hate adverts. I hate the fact that...