| Or Have We? |
| A particular tone has crept into advertising over the past decade or so. It is loud without being informative, playful without being witty, exaggerated without being clever. It is the sort of tone that leaves many older consumers sitting on the sofa, wondering whether they have somehow slipped out of step with the culture. You watch a modern advert — a pink liquid chanting symptoms in rhyme, a pizza brand yodelling its own name, a shampoo bottle performing a small operetta — and you find yourself asking, not angrily but genuinely: Is this meant for me? Or have I become surplus to requirements? I have spent enough years observing marketing and a few years working in a nightclub and in entertainment advertising to know that nothing in this world of persuasion is accidental. There are very few truly foolish decisions in large advertising campaigns. Budgets are tested, focus groups are assembled, creative directors argue, and data is scrutinised. What looks absurd is often the result of calculation. That does not make it less absurd to the viewer, but it does mean there is method behind the madness. The modern advert often feels like it assumes we are distracted, mildly dim, and in need of bright colours to hold our attention. It can flatten complexity into something almost childlike. Adults are shown overreacting to minor inconveniences, chanting rhymes, and pulling exaggerated faces. The viewer is expected to laugh, recognise themselves in the caricature, and feel reassured. It is this soft caricaturing of the adult that unsettles many people. There is a sense that the consumer is being nudged into a slightly infantilised role. Yet if one steps back from irritation and asks a cooler question — what is this advert trying to do? — The picture becomes clearer. We are no longer living in a single-channel world. Advertising once interrupted us; now it competes with everything. We sit with a television on while scrolling through a phone, perhaps half-listening. Sound must pierce distraction. Images must be legible in two seconds. Messages must survive muting. Subtlety, which I personally value, struggles in that environment. The pizza yodel, the rhyming stomach complaint, the hyper-animated character — these are not accidents. They are sonic hooks. Modern marketing has discovered that sound can lodge itself in the mind more effectively than a paragraph of explanation. A three-note jingle will travel further than a calm monologue. It is not necessarily respectful, but it is efficient. There is also the matter of embarrassment. Many products address bodily discomfort, insecurity, or indulgence. No one particularly wishes to dwell on indigestion, odour, dandruff, or excess calories. Humour becomes a solvent. Exaggeration turns something awkward into something socially shareable. If you laugh, you are not embarrassed. A slightly ridiculous advert can make an uncomfortable topic safe. But the deeper discomfort for many older viewers lies elsewhere. It is not merely that the adverts are silly. They appear to value attention over intelligence. Older advertising — and by older, I do not mean ancient — often leaned on narrative or persuasion. It made a case. It explained a benefit. It was trusted that the viewer could follow a thread. The current style often reduces communication to impact. The first three seconds matter more than the final thirty. In that compressed environment, nuance is often the first casualty. It would be easy to conclude that standards have slipped. It would be easy to mutter that marketing has lost its dignity. Yet that conclusion may flatter us more than it reflects reality. In nightclub promotion years ago, the first lesson was not artistry; it was segmentation. One night was student-heavy, another was an older crowd, and another was niche music enthusiasts. The artwork, the language, the ticket price, even the font choices shifted according to who we wanted through the door. If a flyer offended one demographic but electrified another, that was not a failure. It was targeting. Modern advertising is simply more honest about its targeting. Not every advert is meant for every viewer. The Domino’s yodel may be designed for the twenty-something watching streaming television with friends, half-laughing, half-mocking. The exaggerated rhyme in a digestive medicine advert may be engineered for recall among busy parents who need a quick cue in a supermarket aisle. If an advert irritates a sixty-year-old viewer but delights a twenty-five-year-old, the campaign may still be deemed successful. There is a quiet myth that good advertising should appeal universally. That was feasible when there were three channels and a shared cultural rhythm. Today’s culture is fragmented. Brands are no longer trying to speak to everyone; they are trying to speak intensely to someone. The sense of having “lost the plot” may therefore be less about cognitive decline and more about cultural divergence. We are not the intended audience for every message. That can feel like exclusion. It can also feel like an insult. But often it is simply maths. This does not mean all modern marketing is sophisticated. Some campaigns lean too heavily on gimmicks. Some mistake noise for personality. Some confuse irony with intelligence. There is a strain of contemporary advertising that hides behind absurdity because it lacks a compelling argument. It knows it cannot persuade on substance, so it distracts with spectacle. In that sense, older consumers’ scepticism is healthy. At the same time, we should be careful not to romanticise the past. Advertising has always flirted with exaggeration. There were jingles in the 1980s that bordered on mania. There were hyperbolic claims in the 1990s that now seem quaint. We forget the weaker examples and remember the elegant ones. Memory edits generously. What has truly changed is speed. Campaigns are launched, mocked, memed, defended, and replaced within months. There is less time for slow-burning persuasion. The shelf life of attention is short. In such a landscape, boldness is rewarded. Even annoyance can be a form of success. If you are discussing the advert at breakfast, it has achieved something. There is also a democratisation of critique. Social media allows viewers to voice irritation instantly. Brands are aware of this and sometimes even lean into it. Controversy can amplify reach. A mildly irritating advert that becomes a topic of online complaint may outperform a perfectly polite one that vanishes unnoticed. Yet irritation is not the same as disrespect. The question of whether advertisers think consumers are stupid deserves examination. My experience suggests something subtler: they assume consumers are busy. There is a difference. Busy people process differently. They skim. They respond to pattern and rhythm. They remember hooks more than arguments. An advert that seems simplistic may be optimised for cognitive efficiency under distraction. There is, however, a trade-off. When communication is reduced to hooks and spectacle, trust can erode. Long-term brand equity relies on more than memorability. It relies on credibility. A company that leans too far into absurdity risks being perceived as unserious. Savvy marketing teams know this and often balance flamboyant campaigns with quieter reinforcement elsewhere. One assumption worth gently challenging is the idea that younger audiences prefer to be spoken to as children. They do not. They prefer speed and authenticity. The tone may be exaggerated, but it is rarely naïve. It is coded. Irony, self-awareness, and even deliberate awkwardness function as signals. A campaign that looks ridiculous to a forty-five-year-old may read as knowingly absurd to a twenty-year-old. The gap is interpretative, not intellectual. From the vantage point of someone who has seen both sides — creating promotions and consuming them — I have come to respect the underlying mechanics even when I wince at the execution. Marketing is rarely about flattering the consumer’s intellect. It is about influencing behaviour in a competitive field. If absurdity improves recall, absurdity will be deployed. There are limits. When exaggeration tips into condescension, audiences recoil. When humour masks emptiness, brands suffer. The most canny campaigns understand their audience deeply enough to push without patronising—the most clumsy misjudgment of tone. The unease many older viewers feel is not that they have lost the plot, but that the plot has splintered. Cultural reference points are no longer shared. Advertising now speaks in dialects. If you do not recognise the dialect, it can sound nonsensical. I find it useful to watch such adverts with detached curiosity. What demographic is this courting? What insecurity is it soothing? What behavioural shortcut is it exploiting? The irritation often softens when viewed through that lens. It becomes less an affront and more a case study. There is also a quiet reassurance in recognising that irritation itself is not failure. It signals that one’s taste has crystallised. You know what you value in communication: clarity, restraint, respect. Those values remain valid even if they are not currently fashionable. In the end, I do not believe advertisers have collectively lost the plot. They are navigating a fractured media landscape with tools designed for speed. Some campaigns are crude. Some are clever. Many are both. The feeling of cultural displacement that older consumers sometimes experience says less about cognitive decline and more about shifting emphasis. The true savvy lies in matching the message to the audience. That was true in nightclub flyers decades ago, and it remains true in global campaigns today. The noise may be louder, the colours brighter, the rhymes more insistent, but the principle is unchanged: know who you are speaking to, and speak in a way they will hear. If occasionally that leaves the rest of us shaking our heads, so be it. We have not lost the plot. We have stepped outside the target market. |
| About our writing & imagery Most articles reflect our real gardening experience and reflection. Some use AI in drafting or research, but never for voice or authority. Featured images may show our photos, original AI-generated visuals, or, where stated, credited images shared by others. All content is shaped and edited by Earthly Comforts, expressing our own views. |
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