MADE TO MAKE YOUR MOUTH WATER [307]

I recently added YouTube Premium to my list of subscriptions. Google has been testing a cheaper version of this package in some European and Scandinavian countries, foregoing music streaming and offline downloads for its major appeal: watching videos without advertising. Predicting this will be a success that will later be extended to the UK, I decided to take the month’s free trial, knowing that, at £11.99 per month until further notice, it will become my most expensive subscription, more than Netflix, “The New York Times” and Microsoft Office 365.

What I had not expected was how calm I would feel. I no felt tense when an advertisement appeared between a cut, or in the middle of a sentence, and I no longer needed a trigger finger ready to skip past ads. Subscribing proved to be a release.

 

Television streaming services offer similar upgrades as carrots to the user. ITV, the UK’s biggest commercial television channel, allows viewers to pay £3.99 per month to remove ads from its online service – Channel 4 charges a similar amount. Services offering content at a premium in the US, like HBO Max, Paramount+ and Peacock, will offer a cheaper service if you are prepared to accept advertising, while Tubi makes it as clear as possible why you can access them for free.

 

But for me, the placing of the ads was what mattered more than their presence. In the UK, rules governing the number of minutes for ad spots per hour, and the number of ad breaks per hour, are extended to online streaming services, but because YouTube is still mostly thought of as social media to some extent, only the content of ads played on it are governed, not their frequency. With YouTube coming from a country that abolished all limits on television advertising, except around children’s programming, in 1984, interruptions as frequent as I experienced is more likely to be tolerated in the US than in the UK and Europe, perhaps explaining why the cheaper Premium trial is happening in this part of the world.

 

This may be where the problem I had with the placement of advertising, and the relief I feel upon its removal, remains as my problem: as much as I view it as a kind of public access television, YouTube is not offered as this, despite the professional nature of much of the content uploaded by people who make their living by it. They will reap the benefits of ads that were not skipped by viewers, ads that cannot be skipped, and by YouTube extending “mid-roll” advertising to any video longer than eight minutes. I know money has to be made, as proved by the proliferation of sponsorships within the videos themselves, regardless of any ads outside of them, I just wished the following passage from Ofcom’s code on advertising placement could be taken into account, especially when I make another video for them: “Television broadcasters must ensure that the integrity of the programme is not prejudiced, having regard to the nature and duration of the programme, and where natural breaks occur.” 

ALWAYS READ THE LABEL [215]

One morning, getting ready to go out for a walk, I was asked to buy some antihistamines. I knew what type was needed, so I checked: “is that the Benadryl, in the yellow box?” Since there are so many types – cetirizine, loratadine, acrivastine and so on – once someone has finally come across the one that finally works, you must follow their instructions very closely.


In my nearest Asda – if you’re American, read Walmart, because Asda is owned by them - there was only one box of the correct medicine on the shelves: Benadryl’s One-a-Day cetirizine, and it was in a box of thirty tablets for £9.50. I seriously considered walking to the next store to try there, but I then saw Asda’s own-brand cetirizine, again a box of thirty, with exactly the same dose per tablet, for £2.50.

The story should have ended there, but I did think that, if I explained why this different box would be just as good as the branded product, it will make sense. However, I compared the descriptions: the full name of the medicine in Asda’s box was cetirizine hydrochloride – C₂₁H₂₅ClN₂O₃, a combination of carbon, hydrogen, chlorine, nitrogen and oxygen atoms – while Benadryl One-a-Day was cetirizine dihydrochloride, with an extra chlorine and hydrogen atom attached to it. 

I made a snap decision, probably one that Johnson & Johnson, owners of Benadryl, wanted me to make – there was slightly more to the Benadryl than the supermarket’s own-brand product, and that, plus I didn’t have to walk any further than I originally planned. I bought wat I was asked to buy, and made for home.

Naturally, I still wanted to know how effective cetirizine dihydrochloride is in comparison to the other kind, so I looked it up and... none has been detected. It is quite possible that Johnson & Johnson made a very slight change to the existing molecular structure of cetirizine in order to register a patent, but I have no evidence to confirm that a common practice in medicine happened in this particular case.

Quite obviously, the power of advertising worked. Fruit and vegetables are the same from one place to the next, but the more particular you can make something, the more exclusive and individual it can be, and the more essential you can make it, the more you can charge - being cynical is a two-way street as far as advertising goes, because it still works no matter how educated you are of its effects, and how dismissive of it you are as a result. 

Arriving home, I handed over the Benadryl, saying not to worry about the extra cost for the tablets, as I had been given material for an article – I wait to see if, next time, I will be asked about buying the antihistamines in the yellow box.

WHAT THE WORLD WANTS TODAY IS THE REAL THING [96]

As one of the most popular and ubiquitous products on Earth, Coca-Cola only needs to advertise its brand either to keep itself in the front of people’s minds, or when they need to tell us how many of their drinks have no sugar in them. The Coke brand is solid: its logo has barely changed since the drink was introduced in 1886, the bold colour red is used across all variations, and the silhouette of the “hobbleskirt” bottle is immediately synonymous. To that end, Coca-Cola advertising can be brilliantly straightforward: apart from American taglines like, “Coke Is It!” and “Red, White and You,” I remember a British poster ad, from a few years ago, of a Coke bottle against a red background, with the line, “And what would you like to eat?”

Haddon Sundblom

Then there is the “Yes” girl – the Coca-Cola Company’s website points out it would never say “girl” these days. The most famous “Yes” girl ad was from 1946, in a billboard ad painted by Haddon Sundblom, who had also been painting the Coca-Cola Santa Claus, the character’s face inspired by his own, since 1931. The ad features a woman in a bikini, sat on a beach, perhaps propping herself up after sunbathing, being handed a bottle of Coke by someone outside of the frame. Other than the Coca-Cola logo displayed on a red disc like an enormous button, the only other element is the word “Yes” - the woman is sitting on sand, but the background is white, as in blank.

I first came across this ad in the definitive history of the drink and the company, Mark Pendergrast’s “For God, Country and Coca-Cola” – this book also happens to print, towards the back, what is believed to be the secret recipe for Coke which, apparently, includes coriander, cinnamon and nutmeg. It just didn’t make sense to me: who is saying “yes” to what? Is it from the woman to the drink, or from the hand to the woman? Am I, looking at the tableau, supposed to be saying “yes” to the drink, or the woman, or both?

It should be noted that the Freudian, psychological approaches to advertising and consumer behaviour would only become commonplace in the next ten years, and Coca-Cola had its own rules on how people would be used in advertising, seeing as it is drunk by everyone: both women would be seen in roles as varied as men in Coke ads, especially in uniform during the Second World War, and even after a switch in advertising agency in 1950 meant painted ads were swapped for photo shoots. Perhaps, at that point just after the end of the war, a focus on being seen to enjoy life was paramount.

With 2018 eyes, the 1946 “Yes” ad does not look innocent, but it is only because we are wiser to practices used in advertising since then, surrounding the use of women as a glamourous garnish, that would be interpreted as sexist. Along with Sundblom’s other painted ads for Coke, the “Yes” girl occupies the same area of popular art as John Gilroy’s work for Guinness, including the famous toucan, but we know straplines like, “Lovely day for a Guinness,” and “Guinness is good for you,” are not claims Guinness would, or could, make nowadays. Having the single word “yes” is too oblique for an ad, and too open to interpretation one way or the other – perhaps Coca-Cola should have put the “yes” in quotation marks, like they did elsewhere.