Garden gnomes are back! It’s true. After years of the
sort of discrimination no longer allowed against anything living, garden gnomes
have returned to the media. A brilliant IKEA advert may have the
opposite effect to that intended while the 100th Chelsea Flower Show
has allowed them in for the first time ever. They say just for this year but
you never know. It is a triumph of sorts after a few decades when the normally
ubiquitous inhabitants of those small corners of gardens found themselves
ostracised, banned and generally discredited. Perhaps there is a way back…
These days TV adverts are treated as an art form in themselves. There’s always been a fondness for them- witness the nostalgia for the old Smash ads with the metal aliens for example- but more recently they have become just as important -and sometimes more important- than the programmes they sit in between. Where once upon a time people would enthuse about a TV programme they’d seen the previous evening, nowadays they are just as likely to go on about an advert.
More likely to be conceptually innovative than drama, television adverts are limited only by the amount of money firms are prepared to pay for them which, judging from the end product of some, is quite a lot. As anyone who has sat through one dimensional adverts in other countries will know, British ads are the most innovative in the world and have come to define the way we think about products. Cars are mighty, incredible and dynamic thanks to advertising even though all they really do is get you from point A to point B. Adverts sex up food, clothes, furniture or anything however basic the item may be. They make us aspire to lives that previous generations would have considered beyond their reach; the fantastic series Mad Men imbues some of the start of this thought process. Despite being set in the 1960s it speaks to us because we all think like advertising people now.
