If we keep pushing the boundaries, how far will adverts need to go?

Please be advised: The content of this post - due to its nature - is graphic and contains images that you may find offensive. If you're squeamish, this may not be for you.

With a catchy post-folk soundtrack jangling in the background, a group of teenagers drive out to the beach for a day full of the kind of care-free frolics that make you want to return to those sepia-washed, halcyon days.

And then this happens:

This is the latest example of shockvertising – the intentional development of adverts that are designed from the ground-up to catch our attention.

In a society where we are constantly bombarded with advertising messages and promotions, we have become accustomed to tuning-out. How many of us now pay anything more than a perfunctory level of attention to commercial breaks on television, or the 10 minutes of product placement before a movie?

With the instant distractions that smartphones and tablets now offer us, advertisers are working harder than ever to secure a slice of our attention and shockvertising is becoming ever more prevalent.

Like a slap in the face, this medium is intended to wake us up from the perceived catatonia brought on by the hundreds and thousands of adverts that we absorb each year.

Traditionally the mainstay of government-sponsored public service announcements - such as those that remind us of the consequences of drinking and driving at Christmas or graphic images on cigarette packets – shockvertising pushes the bounds of social acceptability to breaking point (and occasionally beyond) in an effort to grab our attention.

This ad by D&G was banned for promoting gang rape

By focussing on taboos such as sex, violence, profanity, brutality or drug abuse, advertisers hope to have their messages recognised above and beyond the white noise background of advertising to which we’ve become accustomed.

Alongside the obvious shock value inherent in the grotesque, shockvertising can be less overt and more subversive, targeting established religious or political norms and challenging established perceptions.

The instigator of shockvertising, Italian clothing brand Benetton, covered many of these topics in their seminal 1980s campaign, which was the first to transgress racial and sexual lines.

The NHS's 'Get Unhooked' campaign drew huge numbers of complaints

But does shockvertising offer any additional value? Experts have been asking this same question for the last three decades with opinion still split.

Whilst some campaigns highlight broader social causes, such as human trafficking, child abuse or animal cruelty in an effort to engage public awareness, others are merely there to ensure that their product or brand sticks out in our memories.

This has been particularly prolific in (although not limited to) the fashion industry, with Benetton, Calvin Klein, Sisley and Dolce & Gabbana all courting controversy through their choice of adverts

Several have been deemed too much even for the increasingly calloused social sensibilities and banned outright.

A hugely controversial campaign from WWF

It is difficult to argue against any campaign that is creative, carefully thought out, well executed and which make people think about the realities of uncomfortable situations.

But with a rising tolerance to graphic images, has the advertising pool diluted the power of the shock advert?  

Is this the only way for advertisers to get their messages across and if this is the case, how far will they need to go in the future to register the same impact?

Perhaps the question should not be whether or not shockvertising brings value to a brand, but whether or not it should be used to sell jeans. 

This blog was originally written for Core Marketing. 

Facebook's growing pains are at least in part down to its parents

The above image has been doing the rounds of Facebook and bobbed into my newsfeed just in time for the site’s tenth birthday.

One decade and 1.2 billion active users later, the slightly seedy ‘who would you rather’ concept of thefacebook – comparing photos of female university students – has evolved into the digital juggernaut that is today’s byword for social media.

But Facebook is far from a faultless success story, with allegations of handing over users’ details to third party agencies (including the NSA), a failed bid to purchase zeitgeist social network Snapchat and dissatisfaction amongst users for exactly those reasons outlined in the graphic above.

I’m no Zuckerberg apologist but I find the aesthetic amends that have been made to the site relatively palatable. Facebook is a digital platform. It is part of the technological sphere and as a result will doubtless undergo a raft of iterations during its life; that is the nature of the beast.

What I intensely dislike, however, is Facebook’s ‘mother knows best’ attitude to what we should or should not be seeing. This video from Veritasium outlines the core issue - Facebook would like us to sponsor posts.
Obviously!

Perhaps of greatest concern to the site are the numbers of teenagers who are reportedly cashing in their social media chips and taking their business elsewhere, with one report going so far as to suggest that Facebook may have jettisoned three million US teenagers in the last three years alone.

For the majority, however, the threat to leave Facebook rings hollow. How many of us who are in our late twenties and early thirties – the genuine early adopters of the platform – would actually close our profiles?

I know of only a handful of people my own age who aren’t active on Facebook: one who is hiding out from the Russians – no, seriously, he is – and another who just doesn’t ‘get it’.

The truth is that we’re now hardwired into the Facebook experience.  People’s whole lives will soon be charted via their Facebook page, a portent of which has already come in the form of the little baby found at the very bottom of your timeline, marked ‘born’.  Creepy, no?

Where else would we go? No other social media platform offers the same level of flexibility that you can get from Facebook.  Twitter? Too short. Google+? Just for geeks. MySpace? No. Just…no.

While it has all the makings of a true vox populi, we have to remember that we don’t own Facebook. 

It isn’t ‘ours’ although it’s where we handle most of our social activities and store our photos. It belongs, in fact, to a group of shareholders and I’d wager dollars to doughnuts (or quids to croissants) that what they’re really interested in is ensuring that the ubiquitous adverts are continuing to rake in the funds.

And with the site’s revenues hitting £7.9 billion in 2013 (up 55%) and annual profits totalling £1.5 billion – that’s just over one dollar per user – I honestly don’t think that they give a shit whether we're seeing what our friends post or not.