Friday 11 July 2008

Eugenics and Advertising



Hello - or should I say "guten tag". I'm Josef Mengele, leader of the Nazi's eugenics program.

I'm actually dead now, but when I was alive I conducted all sorts of experiments. Some were horrific. Some were chilling. Some were actually pointless. Some were even horrific and pointless. Nevertheless, they were all aimed at roughly the same thing - trying to create the ultimate human being that could out-perform everything else: I wanted to create a sure fire winner.

So I sliced and spliced and chopped and diced, and ended-up creating nothing more than some wonky old spastics and a right bloody mess. So imagine my joy when I learned the people from CBS Outdoor were employing much the same techniques when optimizing content for their network of LCD ad-hoardings across the London Underground. Whoopee! They're tracking your movements, they're tracking your eye movements - they're unravelling your social genome.

Imagine how empowering it'll be when the results are out. In fact it's a shame I'm dead, because I'd love to get a brief for a CBS Outdoor campaign: "We found drop-shadows on fonts are less effective after 6pm - take it out." "People are more inclined to read things backwards before 10am - invert the copy!" "People will look at animals any time of the day - put a fucking puppy in there!"

Look out London. There's gonna be some real crazy wonky shit coming your way.

Hugs and kisses
Josef xx

No comments: