Moral Decay? Take The Mobar Gazette Toothpaste Six Week Challenge!

Written with moral outrage by Peter File

Moral decay manifests itself in a myriad of forms. This is of course because, for the most part, the degradation of society is in the eye of the beholder. One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. Raunchy music videos may titillate some and cause them no concern whatsoever, whereas others may see simulated sex acts and the gross misuse of carpet pythons as a damning reflection on society as a whole.

Personally, I am probably on the liberal end of the moral outrage spectrum. It would take quite a base, depraved act to even attract my attention let alone cause me to act upon my fear that a fiery gateway between the pavement and the pits of hell was about to open and swallow up everything pure in this world. Every generation has its horrors, this one just happens to be receiving more media coverage than the previous ones. Bearing in mind my seemingly insatiable ambivalence to just about everything, it was with great surprise this week that I found myself muttering about society going to hell in a hand basket.

What raised my ire so? For the sake of avoiding litigation, I’ll call it the INSERT EVIL MULTINATIONAL COMPANY HERE Six Week Challenge. There’s really no need to include the company name, because it could be just about any business these days. They’re all at it. Advertising has reached the point where it’s not enough to use humour or on the odd occasion, facts, to convince the consumer that your product is better than all the others. Even lies won’t cut it any more, and I’m a firm believer in the selling power of lies. Nowadays everything is a challenge, and if you’re not taking the challenge, I don’t know…move to somewhere that doesn’t like challenges, you flaming communist.

The existence of such advertising is not the root cause of my belief that things really are going from bad to worse; shit advertising has been around since the dawn of time. Two things irk me, the first of which being that the agencies employed to write these ads really couldn’t come up with anything better than a preposterous attempt at bringing reality into the selling of the product. The companies flogging these “challenges” can afford to advertise on television and radio. Therefore, it stands to reason that they can similarly afford to employ a professional ad agency to write and produce these shameful attempts at promotion.

Professional ad agencies, while generally filled to the brim with coked-up narcissists with a penchant for prostitutes and intriguing fetishes, do have a knack for churning out copy of a certain standard. While in the eyes of a regular punter the end product may not quite justify the obscene salaries, they get the job done. Hence why it astounds me that agency after agency is happy to litter all media with these inane excuses for ads. Furthermore, it beggars belief that company after company has paid for this bile. I see…so you’re challenging the consumer to take the challenge of purchasing and consuming our product for a set period of time. Brilliant in its simplicity, but I guess that’s why we pay you the big bucks!

The second irksome fact about this whole pseudo challenge business is that people are quite literally buying it. I am basing this belief on two theories. Firstly, if advertisements don’t translate into increased sales, they are deemed to have failed and are relegated to the scrap heap. Therefore, a greater volume of people are purchasing these products off the back of this drivel. Secondly, the testimonials are disturbingly believable. Generally agencies will only employ professional actors to extol the benefits of products. Sure, they look pretty and sound articulate, but we all know they didn’t really eat pauper yoghurt for a fortnight – they had a small part in that cop drama last week, so they can clearly afford the fancy stuff.

The calibre of human guinea pigs in these challenges leads me to absolutely believe everything they say. They have the crooked teeth, the monosyllabic vocabulary, the middle-aged paunch and the pallid complexion of someone who spends their days under fluorescent lighting, perhaps sorting things on a conveyor belt. They have faced their fears, and said YES! I am courageous enough to eat this particular breakfast bar every day for a month and am now amazed that I cannot live without it and its irrefutable breakfast bar benefits.

Don’t think for a minute that I’m hopping up on a preachy high horse with George Carlin. Capitalism is brilliant. Useless possessions might be useless, but they’re nice to look at and fun to use. Rampant consumerism doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, but it will be if we continue down this challenging path of non-challenges. If advertising continues to suffer such a public display of erectile dysfunction, the rest of us don’t have much hope.

And therein lies my problem with these fatuous attempts at flogging products. Advertisements should reflect the moral fibre and strength of a society, they should capture the mood and sell accordingly - e.g. ridiculously extravagant lies in ads should indicate that society is riding an infectious wave of self-delusion and couldn’t be having a better time if it tried. If a communist nation tuned in to western television and saw us running ads like that, they would be so disheartened that they may potentially renounce their core beliefs and get on the capitalism express. Imagine if they tuned in right now. Kim Jong Il would be wetting himself. Hey, look, western consumer just drank skim milk for six weeks and is going to continue buying that particular brand of skim milk. BOMB THEM!

That’s what it boils down to, really. Allowing these inane advertising challenges to continue to permeate our already fragile existence will result in the total destruction of our way of life, culminating in every freedom loving country being annihilated in a deadly shower of North Korean nuclear weapons.