Comments | batbat: Austrian Writer Says Something Wise

batbat

Austrian Writer Says Something Wise

Dec 19, 2007 00:01

One of my favourite quotes is by Peter Handke, the Austrian writer, who once said: An advertisement tells me that life is beautiful - a personal insult.

I think that what he was getting at was that we shouldn't need advertisements to tell us that life is beautiful. We shouldn't, in fact, need advertisements to tell us anything other than that a ( Read more... )

Comments 6

obfuscate December 19 2007, 06:13:11 UTC

Huh. I always kinda thought that was just about really loving the food at Mcdonald's. Why that would be true for anyone, I don't understand, but it seems like some people really do.

batbat December 19 2007, 10:00:16 UTC

Maybe they had different ads in your part of the world. In Britain the whole thing was associated with fresh-faced beautiful young people going on dates, kissing, dancing in the rain, etc., with the implication that crappy fast food has something to do with those sorts of first-love feelings.

obfuscate December 19 2007, 15:33:55 UTC

Oh. Yeah, our people were just happy.

the23 December 19 2007, 22:50:37 UTC

i think that mastercard example is a bad one since the slogan (if not the adverts themselves) is american. our superiority in the field has gone markedly downhill over the last decade or so and ioften we just get overdubbed american commoicials.

batbat December 19 2007, 23:06:51 UTC

There are still some great British adverts out there. Mostly to do with beer. The Carling ones are always guaranteed to be good (although I regret the fact they gave up the old 'I bet he drinks Carling Black Label' tag), Fosters (supposedly Australian but done entirely in Britain) as well as Guiness (okay, that's Irish, but still), Carlsberg (Danish, but the ads are done by a British company) and so on.

the23 January 2 2008, 04:00:05 UTC

the recent carling ads have belong as their slogan. the contrarian in me is alienated. i do like the most recent guinness ad. guinness are very proud of their ads. a large section of their museum in dublin is devoted to them.

of course those are all relatively crap beers (guinness is ok). almost anything heavily advertised on tv is completely wasted on me.

i have noticed a huge increase in governemnt scare ads since i returned. don't pay your car tax and we're doomed....