Advertising

Advertising

Personal principles are praised, but instead
Public Opinion is too easily led.
The muddy brained People must beg for its bread
bewildered by twenty-six cynics of lead.
They’re so artificial, those bland bywords bred,
yet represent love signals, colour code thread.
Cold copy-writers our custom importune
composing cant catchwords to cull off our fortune.
Publicity (p)reaches wherever we tread,
an encroaching octopus tentacles spread,
pours bland inky blessings on all but the dead.
Standardization with all pretence shed
industry offers fat profits ahead, -
as promise of status stands sales in good stead.

Cold creams and cosmetics, shampoos for the hair,
stimulants and sedatives, to each his share,
need needs be invented to spare us from care ?

The sales pitch embraces those parts of the nation
accounting for most of mankind’s consumation
according to up-to-date sales’ information
from market research data based computation, -
women, the workers, the young generation.
(Commitments increase as old scruples are shed !)

Spring water purchased in neat plastic bottle,
sports car equipped with an elegant throttle,
all must be sold, unemployment to throttle.

(With credit all waiting from wanting is fled !)
For the recession, combined with inflation,
threatens the structures of civilisation;
savings must shrink or we’ll face confrontation
from all who would otherwise lack occupation.
New goods and services are stimulation.

Odd sorts, shapes and sizes, confuse, so its rare
that housewives, though willing, can truly compare;
that packaging costs more than product’s unfair !

With prosperous public to politics wed,
privacy’s threatened, it can’t be gainsaid.
Consumer protection is often misled
by headlines enticing and small print widespread.
Set in strip lighting, or spoken, or read,
through radio, T.V., broadcasted in bed.
Nor ever has Internet, spammed, been immune,
text message records, repeats, slick slogan, tune.
Printed in polychrome over our head, -
in so many senses, for senseless fathead, -
over the airwaves judiciously spread
from high ultra-violet to low infra-red,
pasted on posters in blue, black, or red,
advertisement squares all our savings have bled !

(c) Jonathan R
12 July 1975 & 5 August 2006