Music in commercials

The way pop (and classical) music is used in commercials is perplexing. First there’s the idea that playing a cool track on the background will lend credibility to whatever is being marketed, and second there’s the idea behind all brand making, ie. what’s important isn’t what the ad says, but that the customer remembers the name.

Both premises deserve closer inspection. Take the former one, and tell me if you can think of any single case in which the soundtrack improved your image of the product? Moby’s been used a lot lately, and Levi’s has long been a prolific (ab)user of pop tracks. But in fact it would seem that the one benefitting most is the musician. Admittedly Moby was huge even before his tracks were commissioned, but look at that hulking vegetarian now. And what about all the one hit wonders Levi’s has unleashed? I’m thinking of Stiltskin, Babylon Zoo, Flat Eric (or what the hell the name was), Pepe Deluxé… the list goes on and on.

The second presumption is even more problematic. Do the aforementioned thought exercise in reverse, and exclude Levi’s. What brands were all those great tracks selling? I fondly remember a car ad with Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, but I’ll be damned if I can remember the manufacturer’s name. Might have been Ford, but if I’m ever going to invest in a new Mondeo, their choice of music won’t be the reason.

The persistence of musical memories and their power is, at least in my case, unrivalled by visual ones. I bet any Finnish boy my age can still whistle MacGyver’s, or Knight Riders title tune, and while we also vaguely remember what the stars used to look like, the music is vastly better at evoking memories of those two crappy series.

The extent of this phenomenon dawned on me while listening to the excellent Diana Ross and Dusty Springfield collection CDs. I’d never realized that Springfield sang The Look of Love (remember, I’m musical idiot) but I remembered the tune, supposedly from a TV commercial. Also, I’ve got absolutely no clue whatsoever what that commercial might’ve been selling. The second nail to the coffin (watch out for falling metaphors) was hearing Reflections by Ross. The song seemed intimately familiar, and after a while I recalled that it had indeed been the theme song of a television series called China Beach. I’ve never seen a complete episode of that series.

Boring sports

The three most boring sports on television:

snooker
- tubby men and neverending shots of green
tennis
- two people go ”uh!” for three hours and everybody turns their heads from left to right to left to right to left to…
everything else
- it’s fucking sports – you’re supposed to do it, not watch it

Bloopers

Today’s Sunday Times includes an article about the two British suicide bombers. In an otherwise pretty good article, the reporter Nick Fielding slips in an ultra-stereotypic way when describing the other man’s youth: But he also had non-Muslim friends and enjoyed playing football and snooker. As if choice of sports really had anything to do with one’s personality.

Another journalistic blunder was the inclusion of a 1/3 page story about the upcoming Harry Potter game. The article highlights the various obstacles Electronic Arts developers had to overcome in order to make the game work. No wonder she’s the richest person in Britain when she gets this sort of free publicity.

The art of headlines

Financial Times, a respected, although a tinted broadsheet – bad pun intended –, once again demonstrated how difficult it is to master the art of headlines. Saturday’s leader piece bore the heading Gains and losses in the local elections, with a clarifying subheading There was good news and bad news for the main parties. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Oh, and another thing: one FT writer referred to Matrix as a ”cult hit”. What a weird definition that is.

More stats

All this talk of statistics made me check how much stuff there is in the blog. The count has come in at 417 entries consisting of 42909 words, or 320819 characters. This is more than double the last time I checked, which was in the middle of March. It means that the blog is growing at an exponential pace, and will soon take over the whole of WWW. Enjoy.

IQ nitpicking

A whole lot of people don’t seem to grasp what IQ is about. And I don’t even mean that defining or measuring intelligence is a bitch, but that the concept of IQ is often misunderstood. It’s not an absolute measure in the way that height or weight (or rather mass, if we’re being picky – and we are) are, but relative. It’s called ”intelligence quotient” for a reason. Failing to understand this basic premise results in sentences like the ones found in an article on gene manipulation on the Guardian Weekend (3.5.2003).

An ex-editor on Science is quoted in the article as saying If a child destined to have a permanently low IQ could be cured by replacing a gene, would anyone really argue with that? It is a short step from that decision to improving a normal IQ. Errors of this ilk are quite common but it gets worse.

A passage such as Of course, the problem is that if everyone’s adding 30 IQ points, then having an IQ of 150 won’t get you any closer to an elite university than you were at the outset shows exactly what the confusion is about. For IQ is defined in such a way that the median of all people will have an IQ of 100, meaning that if ”everyone adds 30 IQ points”, the resulting median still won’t be 130 but 100 and therefore talk of IQ points is quite useless, even misleading.

There is a possibility that this could be understood to be analogous to percentage points, but this theory can be easily debunked. Note how the author writes about adding 30 IQ points and thus resulting in an IQ of 150, not 150 IQ points. It’s the same as saying ”by adding 20 percentage points, the result is 150 percentages”, which is utter nonsense.

I’m not worried about possible mistakes I’ve made with statistical terms and concepts here, for I know I have an avid reader who’ll surely point out my possible shortcomings in no time.

T9 oddities

My Nokia 8310i knows how to spell Freud but doesn’t recognize Faust. Does this mean something significant?

Word 45: Promulgate

Ethical guidelines promulgated by the scientific monitoring boards so far prohibit actual attempts at human germline engineering, but researches have walked right up to the line, maybe even stuck a toe over it.

promulgate (v) 1: state or announce [syn: proclaim, exclaim] 2: put a law into effect by formal declaration – source: The Guardian Weekend 3.5.2003, p. 21

What the… ?

Okay, who confesses to messing around with our copy of today’s Guardian? First there was this astonishing headline.

Not to mention the picture accompanying it (why the hell is he smiling?). The whole thing had ”the Onion” written all over it. Now, I was willing to write that one case of as a freak accident.

Alas, more fun was on the way. Come to think of it, everything worked out in a way that bears a strong resemblance to self-fulfilling prophecies: once you know what to look for, it becomes much easier to find. But I’m hurrying ahead of myself here.

So after American media satire it was the turn of an old British favourite.

Tell me this headline isn’t something out of a vintage Monty Python episode.

Luckily things then started to slow down.

This headline doesn’t actually have anything to do with the paper but with the English legal lingo in general. Could someone please tell me what constitutes a legal killing?

One more item before I stop. This was a brilliant example of spoof advertising, more clever than the little scuffle between Ryanair and Easyjet (no way am I going to endorse their silly way of capitalizing the name). In case you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, Easyjet has been running ads with the line ”High prices to Spain? That’s bullocks!” to which Ryanair responded by quoting a survey about the reliability of various airlines and the line (paraphrased) ”Punctuality? That’s bullocks!” But I digress.

Take a look yourself. First the one pushing BT’s new number directory service and then the competing one:

But then again, anything is better than the slogan of one local bar / club / restaurant / whatever, the name of which fortunately escapes me: ”Be scene, not herd”. Now I might be a tad on the slow side but doesn’t being part of the scene mean exactly being part of a group of people, ie. herd?

Saturday bliss

Saturday mornings are the best. The house is quiet, no one’s rushing anywhere, I’ve got the best cartoons in the world on video waiting for me (this time around it was 2 × Family Guy, Futurama, and King of the Hill), some freshly-brewed coffee, and to make things perfect, there’s a Saturday Guardian right there on the livingroom table, bought by someone else. Wonderful.

A Heartbreaking ∞ of Staggering Genius

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