mercoledì, gennaio 16, 2008

Model me this

When I use my words out loud, I sound like a bigger bitch than I feel myself to be in my head, because I'm not very good at using my words out loud. For example, yesterday I nearly started yelling at a co-worker because she couldn't understand why she, a bird in her 20's, was getting her television role models from aged types like the flakes on Sex and the City.

Fuck, I hate Sex and the City. The first season was funny and then it was all whine, whine, whine, tick, tock, tick goes the biological clock, oh, Mr. Big, blah blah blah. Imagine dubbing a man Mr. Big on a television show that ran for WAY too many years and never giving the audience a shot of his marriage tackle. I don't know how Chris Noth is set up but surely they could have hired a stunt cock if it was called for. Fucking fatuous. Call yourself groundbreaking, jeebus. I've seen more ground broken at ancient Indian burial grounds.

Anyhoo, I was polite enough to refrain from pointing out that having a role model your own age was more narcissism than modelling, or that it's just daftery to look at television for life guidance, and instead pointed out that people in their mid-twenties aren't attractive to advertisers. The perception is that they're struggling with some sort of debt, be it retard debt from not understanding credit cards or else student debt or both; they have less disposable income than teenagers, who don't have fixed expenditures AND who have parents buying for them; and they have less money overall than people in their thirties, who're generally not struggling by on entry-level wages anymore - and while they may have more fixed expenditures than twenty-somethings, those fixed expenditures are for things you can advertise at them - cars, baby stuff, furniture. Whatever.

So while you might have some crap ripoff where-cool-goes-to-die consultancy like my old bête noire Youthography promising to help advertisers tap into Generation X2, Generation Y, Generation Get-The-Fuck-Out-Of-My-Face-I-Bought-What-You're-Selling-Already-Even-Though-I-Can't-Afford-It-Because-of-My-Student-Loan, or whatever the fuck they're calling us now, the odds of any production companies investing substantially in producing television programming aggressively geared towards people in their twenties is poor. Sensible advertisers will just not be into it.

Anyhoo, I pointed this out to my co-worker, whose response was that she felt she wasn't being served by television. Like she was the customer. After all that time working in television advertising I know that viewers are not the customer; that advertisers are the customers, viewers are commodities of varying value, and television programmes are merely ways to deliver the commodities to advertiers. Surely I should be capable of of expressing that in reasonable terms. All I felt like like expressing, however, was a bellowed 'you have a fucking Oxbridge degree! What the fuck do they teach you there?'

I didn't yell, though. Instead, I changed the subject to how shitty Sex and the City was.

3 commenti:

Hipster Pit ha detto...

This is fabulously rage-y. It made me smile/heartswell with sympathetic annoyance at The Assholes.

Hipster Pit ha detto...

PS: Besides, it's not TV. It's HBO.

Dread Pirate Jessica ha detto...

Pphhhhhhht!