Students, Please Drink Sensibly

Memories of my freshers week back in 2007 are somewhat blurry. The reason for this is no surprise, the volume of alcohol consumed in those seven short days was more than i'd ever consumed before. What with the freedom of living away from home, the need to bond with new flat mate, (which of course needs to be done whilst under the influence) having only a little preliminary work to do ( "it doesn't matter in the first year, anyway" was everyones favorite rhetoric) and lots of (seemingly) free cash injected into my bank account all contributed to freshers being spent in a gloriously hazy state. Thankfully, I have been able to piece together some 'memories' of those nights out thanks to the colossal number of photographs that were taken, and subsequently uploaded and tagged on Facebook. We went out almost every night that week, and the one night that I opted not to go 'clubbing' (my friends were going to a school uniform themed fancy dress disco for goodness sake) I got the impression that I was being quite anti-social. I remember as freshers we were encouraged to go out and get drunk as often as we possibly could; every bar and club was vying for our attention, and everywhere you went people were pushing leaflets in your face promoting some bangin' night out, with 'freshers deals' ie cheap drinks. There was almost a sense that you were expected to get paralytic, with brownie points going to those who could tell the most amusing/disgusting story about what happened last night at so-an-so's. It got to be a competition. I even recall some students who had never touched alcohol in their lives due to religious commitments, suddenly abandoning their faith in favour of peer pressure, and getting blindingly drunk in order to fit in and act like a 'proper fresher'.

Freshers week has now been dubbed 'freshers fortnight', which makes for some delightful alliteration, but also doubles the length of time that your liver and your bank balance take a pounding before university work begins, putting the brakes on the extensive socialising a little bit.

But with such so much encouragement from bars, clubs and fellow students to get drunk, promoting the common message that alcohol is a prerequisite for a good time, what is being done to encourage responsible drinking? Well there is always the tiny voice at the back of your mind that tells you you'll regret it later, but that voice rarely wins. So what else is there out there that gives students the idea that drinking doesn't necessarily equal fun? The government always seem to be commissioning new advertising campaigns to inform us about the amount of units we should consume or the consequences of too much alcohol, but this voice always seems to get drowned out by the barrage of other contradictory messages aimed at students. The latest such campaign, launched to coincide with freshers fortnight, is plastered on phoneboxes all over the place, and looks a little bit like this:

The latest Drink Aware campaign, encouraging us to choose soft drinks instead of alcohol

The adverts, which remind us of some tempting alternatives to alcohol, take a different approach to previous campaigns, such as the 'Too much alcohol makes you feel invincible' and 'You wouldn't start a night like this...' campaigns which show the consequences of having too much to drink, instead focusing on how to prevent getting excessively drunk in the first place. However, the second advert doesn't look like an anti-drink campaign at all, if you walk past this in the street it looks like just another generic Coca-Cola advert. There are a couple more adverts in the campaign, which can be viewed over at the Drink Aware website, but I can't help feel that such messages are too subtle; they're not attention grabbing or hard hitting like previous campaigns, and certainly don't think it'll be enough to convince this years batch of freshers to go steady on the alcohol.

Restricted Article - For Humans Only

Image from Tony Worrall Foto on Flickr

Movie adverts on phone boxes rarely, if ever at all, make me want to go and see the movie they're advertising. I'll usually choose what I watch at the cinema based on the film's trailer, and the reviews in the paper or on the radio. Although, to be honest, more often than not my film choice is simply dictated by what my friends want to go and see.

I suppose that these adverts on phone boxes are simply there to raise our awareness of the film, remind us that it's out there, and make us want to find out more about it. The approach just seems so formulaic though: action shot of the film's main character, whack a logo over the top, and finish it off with a release date and an ambiguous, out of context quote from a critic. I was pleasantly surprised then, when I saw this advert for District 9 adorning a local phone box last week:

The 'human only' phone box

At first first I didn't even realise it was advertising a film, as the eye is immediately drawn to the big red circle with a line through it, and it's not until you look down towards the bottom of the phone box that you see the logo. You'll also notice that there's a phone number too, a hotline which you can apparently use to report "non-humans". It's not often that you see a message like this on a phone box, so out of curiosity I rang the number.

"Thank you for calling the Multi National United hotline. Please listen carefully to the following options. Non-humans have escaped from District 9 and are deemed to be violent and unpredictable. Press 1 to report any non-human sightings in your area..."

There are various other options, and depending what button you press you get different outcomes, one of which results in your call being interrupted by a 'non-human' who informs you that it's actually the alien's that are being mistreated and encourages you to visit the MNU Spreads Lies blog. Visiting the blog in turn leads you to various other websites promoting the film in one way or another, and before you know it you've spent half an hour looking at propaganda for the latest Peter Jackson funded blockbuster, all because of an advert on a phone box.

The advertising is part of a wider campaign by London based agency Spinnaker, and ties in brilliantly with the issues raised in the film. Apparently the advertising isn't just limited to phone boxes either. In America they've been using similar tactics on benches, staircases and highways, all to drum up hype and curiosity about the film.

As for the film itself, I really enjoyed it, but I'm not a film critic, so I won't bore you with my clumsy description of what happens. If you want a proper review check out Edward R Burge's blog, it's quite good.

Message on a Billboard

It seems that everyone and everything is making a come back nowadays. Take That started off the craze, but recently we've seen comebacks from the likes of Blur, Spandau Ballet, The Verve, Spice Girls, and even a one off gig from Led Zeppelin. Apparently 90s boyband 5ive also made a comeback, although you'd be excused for not noticing. And it's not just in the world of music that we've seen a revival of the old; TV shows like Doctor Who and Gladiators have returned to our screens, and Wispa chocolate bars are back in the shops. The latest piece of 20th Century nostalgia to return is the Wispa Gold, riding on the huge success of the original Wispa comeback, the Wispa Gold is the same thing, but filled with caramel. It was discontinued in 2003, but after a petition on Facebook, Cadbury's have announced it's return this September.

So how will they go about marketing the return of yet another classic chocolate bar? After their successful For The Love of Wispa TV/viral campaign, this time round they've opted to harness the power of outdoor advertising. Cadbury's have bought advertising space around the country, and are letting the public decide what goes on it. In their own words:

"We’ve decided to give our advertising space to you guys as a thank you for all the love you’ve shown to Wispa. We've bought thousands of billboards all over the UK and Ireland so that you can share your special messages with the world. Yes that’s right, you let us know your special message and if it gets selected we will post it on a real billboard in the location of your choice."

So you simply upload your message to the Wispa Gold Messages website, and it could end up on a billboard somewhere. The idea seems very similar to some people's responses to our recent Third Space university brief, set as part of the ClearChannel Student Design Awards. I know several people on our course came up with the idea of opening up the advertising space to the public and letting them put their own pictures/messages on it.

It's a decent concept; if you include the public in the campaign itself and get them to interact with it, then they're much more likely to spread the word. There haven't been many entries on the Wispa Gold Messages website so far, but then the campaign was only launched a couple of days ago. Most of the entries so far appear to be messages declaring Person A's all-consuming never-ending love for Person B.



And there's no need to worry if you're not artistic, you can send in a plain, text-only message, and if selected to go on a billboard, Wispa's team of graphic designers will help spruce it up a bit for you by adding some lovely clip-art or some interesting typography, or maybe even both.

Lucky 'Jas' could be getting a message on a billboard from his beloved 'Harps'

Oh Glenn, you're a true romantic

An example of a message spruced up by Wispa. Look, they even added a lovely gold Wispa frame

Amongst the love messages there's also plenty of pictures of people's families and children, as well as an occasional nugget of wisdom or advice that somebody obviously felt ought to be shared with the world in the form of a 48 sheet by the side of a dual carriageway.

Someone's child dressed as young Clark Kent there

Yes, it's important when imparting wisdom to start every single word with a capital letter

Wispa have actually allocated hundreds of advertising spaces around the country for this campaign, including six 'Big Ones', presumably 96 sheet or above, and a large number at underground tube stations in London, as well as countless roadside billboards. You can see all the locations on their interactive map, and there really are quite a lot of them. Come October our streets will be flooded with messages from the public, courtesy of Wispa Gold, which could either be highly interesting, or highly annoying, although I'm sure either way it will generate plenty of publicity for the revived chocolate bar.

I just hope that between now and the beginning of October, Wispa receive some messages that are actually entertaining. After rummaging through all the clichéd love messages, and the occasional picture of someone's cat, I managed to find one message that almost put a smile on my face:

How Things Have Changed

In an old antiques shop yesterday I happened to stumble across this old newspaper from 1948, and it's fascinating to see just how different newspaper advertising was 60 years ago. The newspaper, which I ended up buying, was a copy of the Illustrated London News from April 10th 1948, and the front page contains no headlines at all, instead it is full of advertisements. These advertisements rely almost entirely on text, so the typography plays a much more important role than it does in newspaper advertising today.

The Illustrated London News, 10th April 1948

A close up of the paper's illustrated masthead

My favourite advert is the one at the top for Bulmer's Cider, the very same Bulmer's which has in recent years seen a huge rise in popularity, helped by advertising campaigns both in print and on TV. It's interesting to see that 60 years ago, they were marketing it as "Champagne Cider" or "Pomagne", clearly trying to make it sound more sophisticated. This sophisticated/luxurious image is helped by the addition of the Royal Crest, a feature which I believe does still remain on Bulmer's bottles to this day, although now a lot less prominent. I cannot however, imagine "Champagne Cider de Luxe" adorning the bottles of Bulmer's I drink down at the pub.

This newspaper is also an fascinating example of how the art of copywriting has changed. The adverts shown here use very different language to entice the customer than would be used today. Describing the customer as "discriminating" seemed to be common amongst advertisers of the time, for example in these two adverts for Basildon Bond notepaper, "Always the choice of discriminating people", and Harden's Tea, "For the discriminating".




I also love the copywriting on this advert for King Six cigars, which states "The quantity available for distribution is still, unfortunately, insufficient to meet demands". It's a reminder of a bygone era of advertising, but I think it's a shame we don't see a little more like this in newspapers today.

At Your Convenience

This advert for Channel 4's On Demand service really impresses me. The way that they have turned all of their main programmes into supermarket products makes the advert humorous, and really easy for everybody to relate to. For example, Gok Wan is represented by bright red fizzy pop, Skins is a cheap and dirty Pot Noodle, Come Dine With Me is a bag of flour, and quite obviously, How Clean Is Your House is a box of detergent.

Every time I see it on the television I find myself looking intently for new products or details that I might have missed before. I think my favourite is Cutting Edge, which is a roll of Cling-film, or possibly Brookside, which comes out of the freezer section and has to have the ice scraped off it.

From a design point of view, somebody must have had to design the packaging for each and every one of these fictional products, even though they're only on screen for a second or two. And every detail has been thought of, the colours and the typography used make each and every product seem so appropriate for the programme that it represents. Personally I think the advert would be just as good without the 'celebrities' thrown in as staff, but then you can't blame Channel 4 for wanting to include some of their 'talent'. Overall I think that the art direction and the production is spot on, not to mention the choice of music, which I think gives the advert exactly the right tone of voice.

It's interesting to compare this to the BBC's recent adverts for their iPlayer. I think the BBC have the best slogan, "Making the unmissable, unmissable", but their adverts simply show a generic, clichéd montage of clips from their biggest programmes, which isn't going to get people talking. Whereas Channel 4's attempt is the kind of thing that will get mentioned over a pint in the pub.