Burnt Toast - Bought and Sold

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Published on Tuesday, 14 February 2012 13:53

Written by Berndt Hannweg

Advertising is ubiquitous. It’s safe to say that there is no place in the country where you’d be safe from it.

That you’ll find it in the city is a no-brainer. Every informal settlement will have its Coke spazas standing on the corner and political posters torn free from their moorings, faded promises blowing down dusty pathways.

Even the fanciest boma in the veld, promising comforting rusticity for upwards of R10 000 a night, has a discreet events manager floating about, ready to shill tickets to a prestigious event for the discerning guest who isn’t impressed by miles and miles of untamed savannah on his doorstep.

For the readers of VARSITY, most of your exposure to advertising will come about as the result of watching a screen of some sort. Brainless, good-looking people cavort on your television for 20 minutes out of every hour, desperately trying to sell you insurance or laxative or beer (or to insure you against bad beer). 

In the movie house, those same people have now muscled out the old movie trailers so that you can now watch those self-same ads, but now in deafening surround sound.

Like our ad-splattered nation, the e-world too has lost all virginal space. An empty space on the internet is simply an advert in potentia.

Even Google, famed for its distinctive minimalist homepage, is merely delaying the moment when it springs its advertising on you, waiting for you to enter a search term so that it can “recommend” someone who paid good money to have their website bumped up a few notches.  

The real future, however, lies in Facebook. Oh, how they must have cried tears of joy when they discovered how meekly people lined up to sell their minds and bodies on Facebook.

The most obvious snares are the “sponsored” links on the right-hand side of the site; our advert-saturated minds almost immediately recognise and cynically edit them out. But the second level of Facebook-sell uses you to perpetuate their product. 

Inviting people to join the Mafia, or feed your cows, or purchase an <INSERT EXPENSIVE ITEM HERE> for your <INSERT MEDIOCRE GAME SETTING HERE>. Through being deliberately addictive, these games and Farmville clones thrive on the tiny percentage of players who pay cold hard cash for the ability to harvest imaginary tomatoes at will.

Alternatively, you can “Like” a celebrity, or “Join” a fan group of a particular show, and now they can market directly to you. Cutting out the television middleman and replacing him with the end-consumer has never been so easy.

But the absolute nadir of social media is text-mining, and websites like Google and Facebook are practically printing money because of it. 

As a boot seller, how much would you be willing to pay to show your advert to someone who mentions an upcoming hike in their status, or their event planner? If someone talks about their divorce in an email chain to their lawyer, E-Z Sleazy Divorce Lawyers would be more than willing to have their shiny mugs flash up on your screen – along with a toll-free number.

The next time you go gallivanting about the internet, take a careful look at the ads which happen to show up on your screen, because odds are they’ve been tailored specifically for you.

Above all, never forget that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Like the chickens on the farm, if people are giving you things for free, it’s probably because you’re the product being sold.