pint of plain or advertising overload - reclaim the exterior walls

Sunday July 07, 2002 21:45

by Blisset

Yet another unpublished letter to IT -

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions but I do know I will not be drinking any more a pints of ‘plain’ until I do.

Dear Sir,

First of all I would like to make it clear that I have no problem with people taking a drink and have been known to do so regularly myself. I have been following with great interest recent public debates surrounding our national drug of choice in general and the ‘Guinness’ brand in particular.

I agree thoroughly with the opinion of a previous letter writer to your letters page who called on Guinness to make a charitable contribution as a form of recompense for the, in my mind, devious and calculated way in which their advertising department used the national flag as a flag of convenience during the World Cup.

This will not happen as I believe the company has already indicated to the Irish public in the media recently. I am of the opinion that it would probably seem to them to be the first step down a slippery slope that the alcohol industry in general and the ‘Guinness’ brand in particular would prefer that we all not even take a cursory look down.

Why? Well I took a cursory trip around our gridlocked capital today by car. I stared at a Guinness advert in Stephen’s Green multi story car park while caught there for twenty minutes in a traffic jam which extended into the car park from the street outside. A leisurely drive across the city to the north side and back became for me a kind of hallucinatory journey where huge silk-screened images, based on the myth of Setanta and advertising ‘Guinness’, stared down at me from various construction sites, pub fronts and buildings surrounded by scaffolding. These were unavoidably present at any and every point in my trip and often, in a surreal way reminiscent of the strategies often deployed by advertising agencies, were criss crossed by buses totally covered by Guinness advertisements featuring the hugely enlarged eyes of a crying woman with heavy mascara running down her face encouraging me to ‘FEEL’.

I could not help but ‘feel’ that the entire visual environment of the city centre has been allowed by the present and previous administrations to become the biggest sensurround advertisement in Irish History. Look at these big mythic tableaux. Smell the brewery. The pub is just over there. They will sell you a pint. The traffic situation, which makes a journey of any complexity in the city centre last an hour or more, adds to the effect by trapping the populace in front of these huge images for long periods of time. This is something that advertisers who stick to radio, TV, and print advertising can only dream about. An audience who can not switch off or turn the page. It is unfortunate, considering the problems that excessive and growing alcohol consumption is having on the city, that Guinness dreamt of this tactic before anyone else.

I played for a little known Cooley penninsula based Gaelic team as a child. It was called Setanta. I loved the legend that our team was named for about the young boy and his skill with a sliothair . The recent flag thing was something which I could largely ignore, even though I can still remember feeling, with some pride and exuberance, that I was seeing history during Italia 90 when the flag was reclaimed for everyone in the Football Republic. But this hijacking of the entire visual aspect of our capital city combined with the hijacking of a myth which I love and which is intimately connected with where I was brought up is just plain depressing.

I would like to ask a few simple questions about this. Who, if anyone, is giving permission for all of this to happen in such a coordinated fashion? Who is being paid for the use of our capital city as a giant canvas for an advertising agency? How much are they getting paid? Is any of it going towards defraying the cost of cleaning the streets? Improving public transport in the city? Policing costs? Is any of it going towards the health services? Is any of it going towards public art projects? How much is this type of advertising worth? Would the alcohol industry be allowed to get away with this in any other western capital?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions but I do know I will not be drinking any more a pints of ‘plain’ until I do.

Yours faithfully,

blisset