It struck me in the Sandton City parking garage of all places. Revelation is normally not associated with the area in front of the pay stations below the Fountain Court — usually one is too busy swearing because the machine keeps rejecting your R20 note — but Sandton City sells space on its lift doors to advertisers and, like pretty much every other owner of any public space in this town, they’ve flogged them to Cell C.
So, as you stand there waiting while the kugel in front of you rummages through her handbag to find a R5 coin, you are forced, yet again, to confront Trevor and his googly-eyed frowny face. He’s watching Cell C like a hawk, again.
No matter where I go, there’s Trevor. If he’s not on the lift doors at shopping malls, he’s on bridges over the M1 or plastered all over the Gautrain stations. He’s at the airport and on virtually every single website I visit. He’s on TV and radio and in newspapers and around coffee cups at Vida and I swear to God if I never see his face again it will be too soon. As I’ve noted elsewhere, this campaign is now burned on my retinas, much like the climactic moment in a bukkake scene in a DVD left on pause for two weeks on a 42-inch plasma screen.
Now, there are those who would maintain that this is a good thing. Cell C has my attention; they have cut through the clutter, they have top-of-mind awareness. Accordingly to classic advertising logic, this increases the chances that I will become a Cell C customer when I am in the market for a new contract.
Well, my retort would be that repeatedly bashing me over the head with your marketing message may have increased awareness levels, but it has certainly not endeared you to me. If there were at least some visual variety, some respite from the dreadful sameness of it all — but every single ad looks pretty much identical. The moment I become aware of that black background with the clean white font and, yes, Trevor, I feel a surge of intense anger. I’m so sick of the Cell C ads I’m almost desperate to see one for Heita, Telkom’s new rival mobile offering, although I’m close to hating that campaign too, and they haven’t even officially announced themselves yet.
David Ogilvy himself once noted that trees were far lovelier than billboards, and it’s somewhat ironic that the agency that bears his name should be responsible for this relentless visual assault on the public. The sneaky thing about outdoor is that you can’t avoid it. You can’t change TV channels or flick over to another page. I have no choice but to look at these ads, and I hate that. I feel hounded.
I’m offended that Cell C thinks that through endless repetition they’ll get me to consider purchasing their products. More particularly, I resent the way that they’ve colonised so much public space. It’s bad enough that Joburg is infested with so many billboards, but it’s starting to feel as if we’re in the midst of some kind of Orwellian object lesson, where an amorphous authority constantly tells us to think about them even as they exhort us to tell them what we think. There is no rule against this kind of commercial totalitarianism, but there should be. I have a right not to live in a city that has effectively been annexed by a corporation.
As it happens, I am in the market for a new contract, or will be in the next month or so. So yes, Cell C, I’ve noticed that you’ve been wanting to tell me something. And no — when it comes to signing on the dotted line, it will not be with you.
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