Into the Advertising Abyss: Supermarket Wars

It might be the two years I spent studying BComms, but more likely it's my recent overdosing on (the frankly brilliant) Mad Men, that makes me feel so (unjustly) qualified to form opinions on the advertisements assailing me from supermarket aisles as I groggily and somewhat unevolvedly hunt for the essentials; juice, cheese, and for the love-of-shiny something caffeinated. This week, I'm looking at what some major campaigns are trying to convince you to buy this week, and how they might be considered to have somewhat cocked it up.

I'll start with the alarming. Woolworths' giant cardboard cut-outs of Margaret Fulton are an unkind thing to have jump out at a sleep-deprived and hungover undergraduate on a Sunday afternoon. I'm not entirely sure what this campaign is supposed to do except make children cry out in fear. I wasn't equipped with a ubiquitous cameraphone, but here's a much smaller sample image of Our Lady of Cookbooks. If I recall correctly, the only difference is the cutout is lifesized, and I think she may be wielding some cut of meat like the alpha Zombie at the front of the horde.

(frightening)

I'm as big a fan of Fulton's recipes as the next child of the Australian 1980s. For some reason, however, I had thought that she had passed peacefully away in her sleep at some point in the past few years. This is something I was genuinely a touch sad about, she seems a nice lady who really enjoys baking and who won't sue me for stating that her cut-out alter ego frankly terrifies me. This leads to the situation where this new campaign unfortunately makes me think "Tsk, Woolworths, using the re-animated corpse of Margaret Fulton to sell yourselves as fresh. Look at those cold, dead, betrayed eyes". Or it would, if my brain wasn't too busy quivering in fear and trying to hide behind my liver from what may be a scout send ahead from the apparently oncoming zombie hordes.

As a side note, I'm genuinely quite pleased Margaret Fulton is not dead. As is, I think, the organic supplier whose trademark "Honest to Goodness" is the subject of proceedings against Woolworths, since this is the phrase emblazoned across cardboard Maggie. The supplier claims it's a rip off of his trademark - Woolworths claim that it's a commonly used phrase which they should absolutely be allowed to whore out in to support their claim that they are fresher, healthier, more honest than their frankly identical competitors.

Aldi is back in the game as well, setting itself up as the third party for Australian shoppers with a campaign where they ask "What will you spend the your Aldi savings on?". I found the TV spot for this when I was looking for a copy of the poster to link you to, somewhat bewildered that the answer appears to be "A water feature".

The video merely confirms what I thought was an interpretation-fail by me ("no one could seriously be answering this question with water feature, maybe it's about family-time or purchasing small children on the internet or something. Wait, what the?")-but the answer is, depressingly enough, a water feature. They're presumably not saving up for water-feature number 2, or they would have remembered to bring their greenbags instead of buying the plastic ones instore.

I'm not sure what kind of market research went into this, but I get the impression it's founded in the notion that Australians can be convinced to change their shopping habits over Freudianesque fountain-envy, a point not-so-subtly rammed home as the non-Aldi-shopping neighbour in the piece holds a wilty looking, much smaller garden hose as he gazes covetously at his neighbour's spurty barrel-fountain. I think we're no longer talking about Jamie-Durie-esque decorative garden design at this point, although perhaps phallic competition has always been at the heart of Aussie garden design. Crap. That thought, and distant memories of Gardening Australia and Burke's Backyard are probably now going to cause me to wake screaming in fear at some point.

Also, I know virtually every wholesome Aussie ad runs a bingley jingle as background to their smiley family of actors, but that one is particularly grating.

It's probably a moot point at this stage, but does Aldi even sell water features?

Just once I'd like to see a "look what you can spend your savings on" campaign that doesn't result in the answer being some entirely boring unnecessary consumeristic status anxiety piece of crap. Why not have neighbour A's kids having a college fund by dint of the twenty-five cents Mum and Dad have saved buying Aldi brand fish-fingers? Why not show them getting mail from the family they're sponsoring in Darfur with the extra cash they have now that their bog-roll costs less? Hell, why not have a suite of adult escorts pull into the driveway in the last frame to show that a year's worth of purchases at a supermarket that does low-budget remarkably well gives you more money to spend on areas where you really shouldn't cut costs?

I don't know. Sometimes I think advertisers just aren't trying any more. Insert wholesome looking family + at least one cute child + tacky jingle + soft-focus homey backgrounds (kitchen/garden). Attach interchangeable brand, sell to highest bidder. Branding Aldi as a cheaper alternative - that's a reminder, not a rebrand. Woolworth's fresh food people imaging is also not really improved by continued attempts to reshape and redevelop it, particularly where they've tried (somewhat unsuccessfully, in my view) to attach another Australian brand to themselves as a kind of quality stamp. They'd almost both be better reverting to shouty community television ads where they just hope your brains will fall out your ears in a mushy goo trickle, and you'll end up craving whatever brand of snackfood it is that is exclusively available at one of the nearest major supermarkets. A tip, though- just try to be alert, and not alarmed, by the cardboard zombie Fultons.

Curmudgeon Asks: Where The Bloody Hell Are You, Then?

Forgive me internets, for I have sinned; it has been more than a week since I have updated this portfolio of cranky. The three spam-bots, two people and functionally literate chimpanzee who read regularly will, I am sure, grow and move on.



Canberra has been in the midst of what can fondly be termed IndieFest2011 (also known as the You Are Here festival) for just over a week now, with festivities winding up this weekend. I know it's fashionably post-hipster to sneer ironically at hipsters (and am clearly guilty of it myself at times), but I'm going to concede that this was actually a pretty cool idea. Any publicly funded arts event will inevitably raise some hackles about what the money could have been better spent on, but my best guess would be that this was run on a relative shoe-string, with the highest costs being printing the (admittedly very hipster) program and probably public liability insurance, with quite a bit of support being kicked in by local businesses like the alternative bookstore, all of whom will ultimately benefit if this grows big enough to rival Newcastle's This Is Not Art (TINA) Festival.

As with any festival of arts, attendees probably need to suspend their snark reflex, seek out the events they're most likely to enjoy, and try not to be whiny jerks about the free entertainment in some vain attempt to appear more interesting/complex/sophisticated/coolly aloof than everyone else. Fun and irony in equal measures abound if you're willing to kick in and explore, but if your idea of a great evening is pontificating about your general superiority from the couch then you'll probably have a terrible time.

Given the crapload of money the Territory will be spending on supporting a loud and sparkly firework background to bogan debauchery this weekend (Skyfire), recognition of Canberra's thriving and largely unpaid arts community goes some way to acknowledging the diversity of the Canberra community: we have, at the very least, bogans, hipsters, and the public service to consider. Plus, Friday night's Zombie prom was all kinds of amusement. Cheers to the organisers - you might be incorrigible hipster kids for all I know- but you manage some excellent festival.

CisforCurmudgeon: Why Sophie Mirabella is not Gaddafi; On Getting Along

Like all misanthropes, I cherish living alone as a sort of Valhalla-type paradise of win. Hells yeah, every day is pants-free day and I don't have to hide the gin! Unfortunately, the economics of being neither congenitally wealthy nor a high-priced hooker means that securing a one bedroom home within two hours drive of university or work is about as attainable as the Prime Ministership - should everyone else who wants to live in Canberra fall off the face of the planet in some freak accident that rewrites our understanding of gravity I might be in with a shot- otherwise it's housesharing, that quaint university town practice where people you don't necessarily know very well become your nearest neighbours and gen Y select-a-family. At some point, as well, you're probably going to have to leave your room and get to know these strangers you live with.

My current select-a-family is pretty decent. They're both literate, relatively clean, definitively not racist, and most of the time they pay the rent. We've reached a point of self-referential familial comfort whereby we now stage enormous twitter house civil wars over people's opinion of Black Swan (if you're new, you can find my thoughts on the matter here). Housemate B recently saw this film and decided that he liked it. Since Housemate B is in all other respects a gentleman of discerning tastes, I have to conclude that he is either trolling me (a unique experience when there is the continuous and ominous threat that either one of us might shave off the other's eyebrows in their sleep) or that some hipster zombie stole his brain once the film had lulled him into the semi-consciousness such faux-artistic travesty inevitably promotes.

The point is, like parliamentarians (and except for in relation to Black Swan, you hipster nerd) we've probably got more in common than not. All parties are able to recognise that leaving someone else's cheese on the bench to go sweaty is a crime against all that is right and good in the world. Likewise, all parties are aware that picking a fight over cheese is the action of a petty tyrant, and life mostly goes on and everyone gets to keep their eyebrows. Win! I think the important thing is that no one ever gets compared to Gaddafi over who takes the rubbish out, and I think that makes our house of largely itinerant student-types a cut above Coalition MPs like Sophie Mirabella, at least in terms of basic human decency and perspective.

If we want to split hairs on this issue, what Sophie actually said this week was that if PM Gillard believed people were actually willing to pay more for things to offset the risk of cataclysmic climate change, then she was clearly "as deluded as Colonel 'My people love me' Gaddafi". Which is not entirely the same as calling someone a mad dictator, but given the wide range of possible similes to draw other than unstable and violent dictators turning the army onto protesters, it is clear that Sophie was showing the restraint, civility and quality judgment of Charlie Sheen on a drug binge. Also, Tony Abbott gets shouty a lot, and so did Hitler. Not that I'm saying, of course, that the two have anything else in common...


Is it trite to compare what happens in the national parliament to what housemates do when someone won't take out the rubbish, or leaves the cheese to go sweaty on the bench? Yes. It absolutely is. We work on the assumption that our representatives are presumably supposed to be better than this, above petty disputes and the kinds of minor human failings that characterise the interactions of the mere plebeian class. If I have to put on pants and learn people skills in order to go downstairs and use the toaster, by all that is right I expect our politicians - practitioners of the 'art of the city-state', to go at least one better than that. Accordingly, however, when the Libyan people are dying on the streets for the sorts of basic rights we take for granted in this country, it is fair to say that is cheap and shallow, by any standard, to use the name of their oppressive dictator to describe a political opponent who wants to institute a carbon tax.

In other news, South Australians are represented by someone who is incapable of making a rhetorical point without an extended hokey-pokey dance session, so maybe we should just all hope our global leaders have long since lost access to the nuke launch codes, settle them down for a post-afternoon-milk nap, and teach them about sharing, toilet-training and human decency once they wake up. Think back to the most thuggish kid you knew in kindergarten - the one that threw sandpit trucks at other kids and who perpetually had one finger up his nose as though attempting to dig through to his scalp. That kid probably votes now, and there's a reasonable chance he might get elected to the Australian parliament to represent your interests at home and abroad.

Maybe we should just all climb back into the trees and wait for armaggedon, really.

[P.S - The Asshattery Award would go to Sophie Mirabella this week, except the fact that she exists and gets to wander around being a representative of the human race, much less a parliamentarian, makes me so despair of the human race that I want to go curl into the foetal position under my bed and wait for society to make some sense. Also, I think if we're handing out awards for worst human being this week Gaddafi probably ought to make the short list, and I don't want to fall into a Mirabellan rhetorical trap].

CisforCurmudgeon: Untangling the Assange Debate

Julian Assange's legal team are currently contesting the extradition order made in Belmarsh last week which would see Assange returned to Sweden to face charges of sexual assault. Look kids, it's easy. No reference to conspiracy theories, Wikileaks, traitors, trumped up charges or the national misandry of Sweden, just a sentence containing a single fact.

This issue appears to have become a signpost issue for ideological positioning, with various hysterical oversimplifications of the facts highlighting from whence on the political spectrum a person hails from.

Variously, the extreme left holds that the charges themselves are a conspiracy by the US Government to silence Wikileaks, that the women were a honeytrap, that Assange can be more easily extradited from Sweden to the Guantanamo Bay and that Assange is a political prisoner. From somewhere in the deep undergrowth of the centrist left comes support for Wikileaks coupled with suspicion of Assange as an anarchist who wants to overthrow all governments using the weapon of truth, and the claim that anyone who dares suggest anything dodgy about the sexual assault charges is secretly a misogynist and apologist for sexual assault. The vocal far-right variously appears to hold that Assange is a traitor to America, a kind of criminal terrorist mastermind who deserves to be locked up, tortured or executed, and they don't really care by what process this occurs.

Thus simplified, this entire debate seems reminiscent of climate change, with various groups who don't understand the science at all deciding that whether or not climate change is happening is a left-right issue and positioning themselves accordingly. Whether climate change is happening, however, is not a space for ideological argument in the same way that gravity is not. Whether or not the global mean temperature is rising, and why, is part of a series of discoverable facts about the universe, and politics really should only be coming into it as a matter of public policy - determining what action needs to be taken, given the best possible understanding of the facts.

The problem with positional adoptions of factual situations is that, even in our cutesy post-modernist intellectual world, science, the law, and David Duchovny's character in the X-files all want to hold that there is a truth out there, somewhere. The bulk of commentators, coming largely from non-specialist media, appear to be content, once they realise the extent to which they must wade through the arcane system of law or complexities of science, to settle somewhere near the bottom and draw conclusions according to the most convenient selection of facts.

Julian Assange's extradition was heard by a Magistrate at Belmarsh. Under the 2003 Extradition Act, which brought British law in line with EU extradition agreements, the Court needed to ascertain that Assange was wanted for a prosecution of an extraditable offence, and also that none of a specified list of exceptions which would make extradition unjust, applied. The court ruled that, although Assange was not arraigned for the alleged charges, certain oddities of the Swedish judicial system meant that we could understand that Assange was in fact wanted not merely for questioning, but for answering the charges before a Swedish Court. The threshold here is low, and the British court would have had to impugn the Swedish process for handling sexual assault charges and indeed the Swedish legal system as being susceptible to coercion, were the judgement made that Assange's extradition to face these charges was improper. In shiny new EU happy family land, that was always going to be extraordinarily unlikely.

That being said, Assange's legal team is correct to appeal this decision to a higher court. The central evidence in favour of Assange's extradition was provided in affidavit (written) form, and the prosecutor did not make herself available for cross-examination, meaning that evidence was never tested. The alleged events took place between 13 and 19 August 2010. On 20 August 2010 the Swedish prosecution (improperly) made a media announcement that Assange was the subject of a rape investigation. At some point over the next month, the charges are dropped by the Swedish prosecution and Assange is advised he will not be held to answer them. Enter the new prosecutor, Ms. Ny, who decides to prosecute after all.

This raises some questions about why the prosecution was revived. In the case of sexual assault, it is manifestly unlikely that new evidence arose, as the nature of the offence is such that evidence is eroded over time. It is also unlikely that, over time, a witness' statement becomes more credible. This makes the decision to re-open the prosecution appear to be a politically motivated one.

I do not wish to comment on the likelihood or otherwise that Assange has committed the offences that are alleged. I know that some commentators have, but to my mind as someone who was not present at the time, my opinion is entirely invalid and would be based on speculation. I do note that the process by which Swedish courts handle sexual assault charges is considerably more private than in our common law tradition. The media in Australian trials is allowed to be present but restricted in what they can report. In Sweden, they are not entitled to be present. A single judge and panel of three political appointees hear evidence and interrogate the accused and witnesses. A judgement issues at the end, but to my mind, if I were hoping to tar and feather someone without giving them an opportunity to publicly defend what have been extraordinarily public accusations, there could be no better venue selection. This is especially the case given the media play the prosecution case has already had in Sweden, with there being little left in terms of protecting the identities of the victims to necessitate a private trial.

Honey trap or no, Assange's extradition is beginning to look very likely, and there are real concerns about impropriety in the way in which the prosecution has handled the investigation. Focus on the idea that it's easier to extradite Assange from Sweden to the US misses a critical point, however, which is that it is not tremendously difficult to extradite from the UK to the US, provided that Assange has a case to answer under US law. Unfortunately for the US, no one can yet point to a US law which he has breached. As is made clear in the judgement issued last week, further extradition from Sweden would likely require the consent of the UK Secretary of State.

I don't think this is a PR move, either, because there is almost no way in which the extraditon of Assange from Sweden to the US doesn't generate a media shit-storm approximately a hundred times bigger than Charlie Sheen's narcissistic meltdown. If the US were prepared to do that, and accordingly undermine the sovereignty of both the UK and Sweden by pressuring their judicial system for a particular outcome, then there's almost no sense in which the US is restrained at all by the restrictions of diplomacy, in which case it would probably have been easier to simply arrange for Assange to be killed and face the possible diplomatic ramifications later.

The real loser in all this is Bradley Manning, the American defence employee who allegedly leaked the cables to Wikileaks in the first place. He's suffering torture, solitary confinement, and the real chance of execution. As a US citizen and someone who leaked confidential information, there are few legal remedies to his current plight. The law, weakened and sullied in a post-911 world to bring us Guantanamo Bay, military trials, and the absence of common law protections for those merely accused of terror offences, in fact protects those who wish to confine, torture and execute Manning. Whether you consider his actions to be a serious crime or not, it remains to be said that his treatment post-arrest has been far beyond what we would hope for from a civilised nation led by the rule of law.

If a tiny bit of the attention on Assange reminds people about Manning, then it can only be a good thing. Underpinning Wikileaks is the notion that exercises of power which occur silently and in the darkest corners where the powerful play, confidentially sequestered from the public gaze, should be feared. Manning's actions, from which we can assume a belief in transparency, shining a light into dark places, has plunged him into the sort of nightmare that makes 1984 look tame, and it is not the time to turn our faces and attention from that dark little military cell in favour of the glittery show-trial of Julian Assange.



Seriously, how can that childlike face not prompt some sympathy, even at the very least 'aw, maybe let's not attach electrodes to its testicles'?