Film, movies, the cinema, the pictures, the silver screen, the flicks, the motion picture has played a dominant role in my life from a very early age, as I’m sure it has in many others. I don’t recall and I wouldn’t want to confabulate, but according to my father, he took me to the cinema in Leicester square circa July 1977 and introduced a 4-year-old version of me to George Lucas’s science fiction cinematic masterpiece, Star Wars. I’m by no means a fan anymore but I’m sure at such a young age the moving picture left an indelible mark on my highly impressionable still forming embryonic mind as I stared wide eyed in the darkness at the huge screen, the celluloid light bursting across the theatre illuminating the auditorium like a religious experience with projector above beaming the film over our heads to be reflected back on the audience with images dancing over us, as we all tucked into our popcorn and watched Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero with a thousand faces’… in space.
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The other night as I settled onto my settee for the evening, I picked up my fridge-cold can of Brewdog, their Elvis Juice flavour to be exact and took a good hefty hearty swig. This was the way to end a night, with our nations much loved ‘alcohol’, the permitted and accepted drug. I was acting out as the rebellious consumer chugging down on a Brewdog and living vicariously through their outrageous and offensive advertising as they ‘disrupt’ the alcohol market with expletives and engage, which I guess could be considered postmodern, in the act of mocking advertising itself. It is an interesting insight into the workings of a society where marketing that uses cussing and coarseness still resounds as an act of rebellion, you only have to look at the millions of people who were willing to pay to have the word FCUK across their chests. But yes, it still grabs the eye of the consumer, and particularly rankles as we work our way through this new age of purity. Does this say more about marketing or about us, the consumer?
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