Final post for blog

Google has failed to index a lot of pages on this and other sites so I am throwing in the towel. I mean, Google even owns Blogger, which is where the blog you're currently visiting is located. If the parent company cannot see content made by a subsidiary there is something seriously wrong with either the parent or the health of the child. I blame the parent. I certainly won't blame myself, I just don't have the time to get up to speed on all aspects of search engine optimisation so am going to go over to Medium (@mattdasilva) and LinkedIn (matthewdasilva). I've also started using Prose and Post News, both of which don't require elaborate hacking skills in order for your work to be seen. It's almost exactly 18 years since this blog started and in that time I've published thousands of articles on a range of subjects. I intend to continue doing this, but just not here. If you want to stay in touch you can find me on the socials or get in touch by email and I'll work out a way to supply you with the content you require.

Is there a divide between beautful art and meaningful art?

This post is a response to Andrew McIlroy’s article on “value-free” art in Australia. I read the post with eagerness because this is something I think about a lot, the difference in art between the purely decorative and the meaningful. I wonder how you can split the two things into separate categories? Is it a question of working withing a specific tradition? How has popular culture, specifically advertising and other media such as cinema and TV affected the fine arts? What barriers are there in people’s minds, people in the street or in the commercial gallery who come along to a show opening to mix and mingle, chat and view the works for sale?

It's a conundrum.

I think Andrew has a point in that there is a lot of art available that is objectively beautiful, and you think that the gallerist and the artist want to offer something for sale that will be acceptable to buyers who might want to take a work home and put it on a wall. I mean, it’s easier to feel comfortable with a Klee than a Kollwitz. Because of the coexistence of different styles now – it’s just as acceptable to paint an abstract as a figurative landscape – there is a lot of choice for artists who want to appeal to buyers. I wonder if Francis Bacon if he were an up-and-coming artist would have many buyers? For my part I am not a fan of Bacon but accept that he’s a valuable commodity.

In literature I coined a new term Divergism to describe the market for books, there are so many genres available now that there’s no longer a mainstream, there are several mainstreams. In visual arts it’s the same, you can do anything now it’s fine people will understand (or at least the community of collectors and aficionados will understand) if you paint abstract, figurative, semi-figurative, semi-abstract; anything goes. I guess this means that it’s possible to paint something that is objectively beautiful and that simultaneously is meaningful. I might borrow tropes from commercial art, styles of combining colours or of making lines that are common to advertising, but in doing so make a comment on life more broadly. Or I might try to be ugly, or use just black and white, and do something that is essentially designed to be merely beautiful. I fear I’m not making myself clear however, and so I’ll backtrack a bit.

In television there are two very popular types of program: cooking shows and shows that feature real estate. Both are innately highbrow but they also manage to be popular. Some are more popular than others, so for example while Nine Entertainment has ‘The Block’ the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has ‘Grand Designs’. Network Ten has on weekends many cooking shows in the afternoon. You get tradies and sportspeople cooking on ‘MasterChef’ and you get everywoman and her dog fronting up for ‘The Block’. Food and shelter are perennials.

It's different for art. It’s hard to get someone coming in off the street to front up $1000 for a painting where you can use the same amount of money to eat for two months for the whole family. But the people who are buying the paintings are the same people who are watching ‘The Block’ and ‘Grand Designs’. You know they’re interested in culture (design and food are great cultural products) and you know they value their way of life. So if all art is flattery what are the triggers that are going to separate the punter from that elusive $1k?

In the era of ‘Kath & Kim’ what’s low brow enough to please the average gallery visitor? It has to be something they want to live with, but they also want to feel as though they’re getting in on the ground floor. Everyone likes a bargain but art is inherently exclusive. It’s a fine line that commercial galleries have to walk in order to do conflicting things. On the one hand they need to appeal to the masses but on the other they need to signal that what they’re offering is high-brow.

I think that at a time when we’re confronted by Postmodern works of art that were written by our grandparents we need to find ways to accommodate a range of imperatives. I don’t think that purely decorative art is meaningless but perhaps we have too much choice. There literally are no rules, there are galleries in Sydney aimed at a range of tastes (I can’t speak about Melbourne) from Pop to Neofigurative, from Abstract to Aboriginal. In this world of zero boundaries perhaps our preference for the beautiful is a way to anchor us to something in the face of too much liberty. Perhaps we need the chain of gorgeousness to stop us from floating away on a wave of excessive feeling?

Abstract series

On Thursday I was due to meet friends for dinner in Darlinghurst and there was a show opening also nearby to go to. A friend had furthermore offered to give me things for the baby (my daughter is expecting) so I had three reasons to go into town, and caught a bus at around 3pm. I went to the Sheraton Hotel to pick up the bibs and cap then went to Dymocks and bought some more children’s books as well as some art books.

I started reading one on abstract painters when I was in the CBD at Westfield’s food court where you can sit freely for as long as you like, then I tried getting on the train but it didn’t come so resigned myself to resorting to a bus, which I caught on Elizabeth St.

The walk down from Oxford St to Rushcutters bay was a little stressful because I was always wondering as I went along when my heart would start thumping but it stayed calm. I took in the show by myself – you can see the review on the Esag blog – then sauntered back up the hill to Victoria St where I sat down on a bench reading.

The cars were buzzing behind me and one popped and snorted as it changed gears because it was owned by a young man and he thinks that making noise is as fun for everyone else as it is for him. For about 30 minutes I wandered mentally through different worlds, art movements, manifestos, declarations etc and I came away amused at the frailty of human endeavour, we think what we do has a certain meaning and it turns out that other people (in the future, say) don’t care a fig about what we say and only admire the pretty pictures.

Last night I talked with my friend Basia about all these earnest people and their exhortations and “position statements” etc and we laughed (I love the pretty pictures though). We also talked about the abstract works I made in response to reading the book (see below), I started with an unused base watercolour from a previous series and did four more to make five in the ‘Yellow abstract’ set, then did four ‘Orange abstract’ paintings using some of the new paint I picked up on Thursday.

At dinner a friend of a friend commented on my paintings (not from the abstract series) and later I saw an SMS she sent regarding them that noted their preliminary nature, I think she wants me to make acrylic or oil paintings and use these watercolours as studies. I took this person’s words to heart thinking about the future and its mysteries but haven't moved away from my current method yet and possibly never will. I’d shown her some of my return to the ad slogan series (see below) and I hadn’t started on the abstract ones at that point. her husband also said I should use larger paper but after talking with Basia about both of these suggestions I'm deciding to stay put for the moment. I'm enjoying myself.

Ad capture (03) – Pandora

This the third in a series of posts that are designed to take a detailed look at TV advertisements. I want to slow down the experience and pay attention to what is offered to view between programs on the small screen. This kind of content tends to be considered unimportant or ephemeral.

This 30-second jewellery ad came just after one advertising fruit and vegetables and just before one for an electrical goods retailer. The way the earlier ad approached its subject was to promote health advantages, especially as they relate to mood. The retailer’s ad was aimed at businesspeople – many of whom run small businesses, or people who operate as sole traders – who might be interested in taking advantage of the federal government’s instant asset write-off policy, allowing people to immediately (instead of incrementally, over the longer term) subtract from taxable income any business expense (equipment) that might be incurred before the end of the financial year (I saw the ad on 28 June, two days before the end of the financial year).

The Pandora ad – which I saw again in the morning on 4 July while watching ‘MacGyver’ on 10 Bold – opens with drums and the soundtrack quickly segues into a song that was specially produced for the company, a Danish jewellery retailer with manufacturing facilities in Thailand. The lyrics are simple and direct and play over the top of a series of video segments that are carefully orchestrated to support the corporate goal, which is for people to go online and buy a bracelet for their significant other.

The lyrics go like this:

You bring me joy,
you bring me joy
you take away the pain
with your loving ways.
About the way I love.
Cause every time I see you,
you remind me just the reason
you bring me joy.

The song is bluesy and emotive, evoking a time in the past when manners and mores were more traditional, but with a modern twist (since no-one can meaningfully suggest that jazz is old-fashioned; it’s timeless), and contrasts with the broad smiles of the people shown in the video, most of whom are women. The overall effect of the ad is more refined than pushy.

I’ll return to the theme of variety later on in this review, but it’s worthwhile mentioning at this point that the tune and the lyrics are appropriate as accompaniment for both busy and slow segments of the video, and with this ad you get both.

In broadcasting their original song with segments of carefully designed video, the admakers have added a certain discipline with respect to the timing of words and images. What I mean by this convoluted explanation is to describe how, sometimes, particular words are timed to appear along with certain images – a child, say, or a segment of plain text on a dull pink background (which is also the colour used to display the company’s logo) – but, on the other hand, sometimes synchronisation is absent. By alternating a disciplined approach to the broadcasting of segments, and a looser, less formal one, the creatives behind the ad allow the viewer to experience a range of emotions, and to relax. (You’re not being pushed into doing something you don’t want to do.)

I talked in the previous post in this series about how diversity and contrast in the transmission of elements to the viewer enriched the experience of watching an ad. The same is true of the Pandora ad, even though the subject matter is very different. Whereas, in the Nurofen ad, such things as colour and the opposition between dark and light added meaning to your experience, in the Pandora ad contrast is equally subtle though it relies on other elements.

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First of all I want to look in more detail at the lyrics. In the above transcript I have tried – to the best of my ability – to add punctuation though, of course, when you listen to a song there is no punctuation and the pauses and phraseology must be implied by the use of voice and rhythm. I had a bit of trouble with the sentence “About the way I love” because it wasn’t precisely clear, even when I slowed the audio track down to half its natural speed – there’s an online tool that allows you to alter the tempo of a song without changing the pitch – where the punctuation should lie in respect of these words. In fact I didn’t even quite get the words at first; the word “about” was particularly difficult to pin down as the stress falls heavily on the second syllable, so much so that the first syllable almost disappears in the singer’s vocalisation. It almost sounds like “out”, with the “a” swallowed in the throat of the singer and the “b” almost lost in the ecstatic explosion of the final syllable.

The singer is a young woman. She has no discernible accent and, importantly, the words used for the song don’t require her to do so. If the makers of the ad had relied on a commercial hit – as many advertising companies do – they might have met with a problem. By getting a songwriter to create original lyrics that are distanced from any secondary meanings – meanings that unavoidably adhere to songs that are part of the culture – the admakers have been able to produce a distinct and authentically Australian ad for its target market.

There is, for example, no “r” at the end of any word which, if an American were singing, would have required a different pronunciation compared to if, say, an Australian had sung the same song. It is clear, however, that the singer was educated in an English-speaking country so, at least on the surface – going by appearances – she belongs to the dominant culture. This is important for this company because it’s a foreign enterprise although its franchise system – which was introduced globally in Australia in 2009 – makes it more likely to be responsive to local markets.

The lyrics do not rhyme and there is no metrical system used for the 38 words they comprise. The word “you” appears in every line (once as the possessive pronoun “your”) except for the one I have already mentioned (“About the way I love”) which contains, rather, the first-person singular pronoun. This line therefore stands in contrast to the other parts of the song. We’ve already seen how it stands out for its lack of definition and clarity, and we now see that, grammatically, it is set apart also. In my transcript I have given this line the status of a discrete sentence as, unlike the other lines, it doesn’t flow into the start of the next line or naturally result from what goes before.

It’s distinct and individual. It’s also important to note that the target of this ad is women but the person who would buy the product would be a man (in many cases; the ad does address the issue of same-sex attraction). The ad however refuses to rely too heavily on the dominant Anglo culture, although in the cases of some of the models it’s not clear where their parents were born. Most of the women featured in the ad are dark-haired, however. In fact, there’s only one blonde, and she is not the most important person you see.

There are four Asian faces and two of the women pictured might have forebears from southern Europe or the Middle East. It’s just not clear and, the creatives behind the ad seem to be saying, it’s not important. This is clever targeting as over 50 percent of Australians have at least one parent who was born overseas. If you count people who might have a grandparent from a non-Anglo culture then you have an even higher level of diversity in Australia in terms of ethnicity. In this ad you see, in fact, traces of a vibrant, multicultural society with distinct values grounded, the creatives behind it seem to be saying, in close personal ties of affection. In fact, with one case pictured it’s possible that the woman who would be the recipient of a gift of jewellery has a partner of the same sex.

The content of the ad signals modernity in other ways, too. Mobile phones (what Americans call “cell phones”) feature prominently, as do, in one scene that places the ad after Covid-19’s onset, computer screens. In a scene starting around the eight-second mark there’s a shot of a woman driving a car and talking on a phone using an earpiece (see image below). These segments underscore the fact that women Pandora is targeting have agency and are independent yet attached to their partners, a seeming paradox of post-war generations for whom the idea of equality is not arguable and is, indeed, a defining element of their personalities.

On the other hand romance is important as well, as the makers of this ad demonstrate in subtle ways. But rather than possessiveness, the ad privileges the idea of gratitude.

As the segment showing the woman driving the car is displayed the song is at the stage of “With your” (the soundtrack quickly cuts to “loving ways” for the subsequent segment). In fact, the audio over this section of video starts with an intake of breath, necessary for the singer doing her job – in the same way that the woman in the car is busy going about the business of looking after the family – to recover from the word “pain” in the previous line of the lyrics. 

The woman we see here is doing two things at once. You can see how her right hand is set on the left-hand side of the steering wheel – indicating that she’s turning left – but she’s also talking on the phone using hands-free devices. Some people drive in this way. I don’t; I’m more likely to always keep my hands at the “ten to two” positions and turn by moving my hands across the surface of the steering wheel rather than, as this woman is doing, fixing one hand on one point of the wheel and dragging it – using the power steering that many cars these days have – to the side.

In the shot you see buildings by the side of the road and, importantly (for a moment), a tree. The setting suggests that the woman is driving somewhere in a suburb of one of the country’s major cities, where living costs are higher but where wages are commensurably higher as well. To add realism, the woman’s hand is not particularly attractive – her wrist is quite bony and her forearm is fairly thick, suggesting strength rather than elegance – and she is wearing (importantly for the people funding the ad) a bracelet that features pearls or some sort of round accoutrement set on a band. There is no watch on her right wrist, suggesting that she’s right-handed.

The reason for her odd hand placement is to obscure the carmaker’s logo – usually found on the centre boss of steering wheels – so that there’s no way to discover what brand of car she’s driving. You can see the seat in which she’s sitting and it’s a new, expensive looking bucket seat. It is pale, a colour like cream, suggesting that a factory option had been selected by the person (probably the woman you’re looking at) buying the car. The steering wheel has controls to the side of the centre boss that is pressed to sound the horn. The steering wheel controls on my old car let you adjust the stereo but on the new car you can do a lot more with the buttons there. 

This shot is extremely complex and varied. You see the woman from the back though also from the left, as though the person (putatively) looking at her were sitting in the back seat of the car. What is most striking in this rapidly replaced scene is colour and variety. You can even see, in the lower left-hand corner of the frame, the other car seat (the front passenger-side seat) in which, presumably, someone (possibly a child) is seated. Perhaps there are two children and we’re supposed to be seeing what the one in the back seat sees every day. 

Which is a woman smiling though she’s shaking her head as if she were saying “I can’t believe it” or something along those lines. As if she were using her voice to express pleasure and anger mixed, concerning something she wants to show was so outrageous that her credulity was challenged but that, instead of losing her temper, she brushed off the disappointment and moved onto the next thing in her busy life. She’s sensible and not prone to unwarranted outbursts of anger.

This is a stunning segment of almost infinite interest, showing the care that the admakers put into every facet of their product. This level of care is evident everywhere, including at the outset, where the lyrics are paired with images to bring into focus the main point of the ad – a man’s gratitude – which we return to again and again, especially as it relates to children. At the beginning of the ad, the song goes “You bring me joy”, and as these words come out from the TV’s speakers we see a shot of an animated and happy, smiling 10-year-old girl (see image below). In fact, the timing of the image is such that she appears a single beat before the word “joy”, on the word “me”. 

Timing is important in this ad because of the centrality, for the viewer’s aesthetic experience, of the original song written for it. Before the scene discussed above, the words “You bring” appear layered over the company logo (see image below) that launches the ad. This is a frame that efficiently serves to cut off the viewer from whatever had come before, and skilfully establishes a sedate tone for the rest of the production. 

The tempo of the music is relaxed and the logo is carefully styled and beautiful in a modern, contemporary way. To return to the idea of diversity, the background of this shot is varied though one colour – pink – predominates but some areas are darker pink and most of the rest is lighter pink. The overall tone of the colour field is subdued and mature. It’s not a candy pink that might be used for girls’ toys and which, in fact, we see in the shot of the ribbon worn by the 10-year-old girl (see earlier image). 

There is a dark patch of colour in the top-right quadrant of this colour field with its company logo. This dark patch of colour blocks out the ideal future, and grounds the viewer in the real past. This is important as is contrasts efficiently with the colour pink, which would otherwise be too cheerful – remember that the lyrics are bluesy and relaxed, and are grounded in an implied viewer’s reality. This is an element of the experience of seeing the ad that returns again and again, notably in the women’s arms and hands. Watching the ad you won’t be mindful of the classical story behind the name “Pandora” – the woman who opened the box of evil spirits – a name that combines a sense of female agency and power with a suggestion of the elemental and irrational. 

By itself, the name might conjure up negative feelings, but the ad reassures. The background colour is moreover one that would suit a mature, elegant, youthful woman who is also a mother, but pink reappears (cleverly) in the next shot (at about the ad’s six-second mark; see image below), which shows a woman laughing while talking on her mobile phone. Here, the woman’s mobile phone case is pink. Her right arm again is wrapped in bracelets – possibly of the kind the jewellery maker funding the ad makes in Thailand – and in her left hand she holds some papers, which distractingly fly around (she’s gesturing with her left hand as she talks), adding variety and movement to complement the movement of her torso as she’s animated by emotion deriving from her phone conversation.

In fact, emotion is readily visible as the woman in this scene actually cries, using her left hand, the index finger bent and raised, to wipe moisture away from her eye. The word “pain” arrives with this gesture, but this scene, with its bright colours, is again joyful and relaxed. The woman wears a blue-and-yellow top and her hair is tied up at the back with an elastic band (which we cannot see; we saw the one for the 10-year-old girl, and it was bright pink). She is right-handed and we see her face from below, as though we were (again) a child looking at his or her mother. 

The woman is not the same one as the woman in the car, but this woman also has a bony wrist and dark hair. She is also wearing, around her neck, a chain or some form of necklace. Importantly, in this shot we also see trees – out of focus and again in the background – suggesting that the woman on the phone is in a park (possibly looking after children while going over some important documents). Adding variety, there are telephone lines on poles, visible in the space to the right of the woman’s head. 

Even more importantly, the visuals in all of these scenes rely on strong diagonals, which link to the manufacturer’s name – there are two capital “a”s in the logo. In the scene with the woman in the park, left-to-right diagonals exist in the line of the woman’s head – she is slightly bent at the waist as she talks – as well as the paper in her left hand, her right arm, and the telephone lines. Going the other way (right to left) are the lines of her left arm and the phone, but there is also an interesting play of lines to do with her shirt at the right shoulder, where the fabric is folded and hanging from it in pleats. These lines harmonise beautifully with the complicated lines of the woman’s right hand, which is holding the phone; the fingers are individually visible and separate. 

You can see the sun shining. Behind the woman’s head you see a blue sky with clouds illuminated by the sun, which also shines on the jewellery on the woman’s right arm. It’s a stunning shot of concentrated power and presence, and ideally illustrates the kind of relationships that a modern, independent woman is capable of making with the people in her life. A reasonable man must be deeply attracted to this kind of woman. The “you” of the song lyrics (though they’re sung by a woman) is the woman in the ad. 

She’s everywoman and with the words “your loving ways” she reappears again at the 10-second mark after the woman driving the car. 

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What I have described so far is only the first 11 seconds (approximately; in fact, a bit more) of the ad; there is so much information packed into it that it’s almost indescribable.

But I try. The first 13 seconds of the ad are, to provide a quick summary, elegant and simple. Then there’s a busy period up to the 24 second mark that is populated by quick changes of imagery with a lot happening in them. At 24 seconds you get the shot of the Pandora shopping bag, and at this point things suddenly slow down again. 

Variety being the operative word in this ad. Between the segments showing people going about their business – driving a car, talking on the phone, visiting friends, walking in the wild, speaking on Zoom – there is text that adds meaning and that spells out a sentence. It’s as though a person were talking to himself with his thoughts being interrupted by memory at particular moments. As mentioned before, the different segments appear either at tonic moments with respect to the song being sung, or off the beat. Variety is the important thing. The sentence being spelt out is, as follows: “Thank you for always being there even when we’re apart.” 

Ads are notorious for nailing the critical point down, in fact they exist precisely for this purpose. To emphasise the ad’s main message, the following is repeated near the end of the ad: “Thank you for always being there.” As with the video used in the ad, these words emphasise the importance of relationships.

In order not to outstay my welcome I won’t go into much more detail than I already have done, but it is worthwhile emphasising again how the ad uses variety. Not only does it vary the types of people – a number of ethnicities are welcomed into the fold – but they are engaged in different activities. For example, featured at around the 13-second mark there’s a group of three smiling young women enjoying junk food. These women are notable for not using technology – everyone else in the ad is either talking on the phone, taking a movie of someone else, looking at pictures on their mobile, or using Zoom to connect with people overseas – but like most of the other people shown they display positive affect (they are smiling broadly).

Then there’s the Zoom convo (which also involves some Asian people) at the 18-second mark:

There’s a woman with a toddler at the 20-second mark:

And you have some people hiking in the wild at the 21-second mark:

These later segments, past the 13-second mark, are less carefully crafted and are more like real life. They’re less staged and less beautiful, more real and less ideal. All this because they’re less important, merely underscoring the points already been made in the opening segments, that I’ve talked about in greater detail above. The long segment with the three young women celebrating with pizza is the hinge upon which the ad turns.

Not until 24 seconds do you get (see image below) the money shot: a segment featuring the precious cargo (the bag with the jewellery in it). The final five seconds of the ad has far fewer segments and is, in general, slower and more thoughtful. You get, at this point, the opportunity to rest after all the business of what went earlier.

It’s also worth noting something else about the ad, which is that you only see jewellery in context, apart from this specific shot at the end of the proceedings. This strategy ensures that you aren’t tired of the sight of jewellery by the end of the ad; in fact you might even be unsure, until this point, what the ad is about.

The small, hand-written tag on the parcel says “For always being there” and a heart symbol is appended at the end of the clause just to make sure the message gets through. The effort made by the admakers to contextualise the product demonstrates that the manufacturer is not interested in the hard sell. Everything about the ad works through suggestion and, apart from the “o” in the brand name shown over its pink screen at the beginning of the ad – the letter designed so that the circle has a small, crown-shaped feature on its top that is evidently meant to represent a jewel – you aren’t explicitly shown the product until you see this bag with the gift in it.

In the above I focus mainly on the secondary messaging that operates in addition to the words used in the song and in the static text displayed in white letters over a pink background in some segments. Almost like subliminal or hidden messaging, in subtle ways video content affects the conscious mind as it tries to make sense of adverts.

Ad capture (02) – Nurofen

This the second in a series of posts that are designed to take a detailed look at TV advertisements. I want to slow down the experience and pay attention to what is offered to view between programs on the small screen. This kind of content tends to be considered unimportant or ephemeral.

This 15-second ad came after one for a home building company and before one for a food delivery service. The narrator asks: “Looking for osteoarthritis pain relief?” With this voiceover, the screen fills with a store aisle and, on a blue sign in the top right, the word “Prescriptions” as though, for reference, you were being placed in your imagination in a pharmacy. The shelves are pale and grey, with only the occasional sign indicating that you are supposed to be in a real place.  Some of the objects on the shelves are boxes, some are bottles. They are in a section of shelving marked “Pain Relief”.

They look like the types of bottles that liquid comes in but whatever they contain, the dream-like and washed-out colours give the space an unfamiliar feel, as though the woman in the ad had suddenly found herself in a distant shopping centre – convention might tell you something about where you are but a lack of the fine detail that accompanies you on an everyday outing to your local supermarket means you feel disoriented.

Entering the frame from the right-hand side, the woman has blonde hair and a slim build. She turns her head as she progresses, slowly and tentatively, on foot, approaching the camera. She moves from right to left, giving you the impression that you are at the beginning of a story. The imagery links cosily with the voiceover and the suspense you feel at being part of this woman’s quest – she’s someone struggling to solve a problem (what drug to buy?) – is lessened by three quick cuts that bring her rapidly to a column of shelves marked at the top, in big white letters, “Pain Relief”. The same words are printed on blue signs plastered to the sign of not one but two columns of shelves (see screenshot below).

No time is wasted in getting to the point and the blue of the signs, in stark contrast to the grey and white of the confusing shelves, offer a bit of comfort, blue a colour freighted with meaning in Australia as it is associated with authority. It is used by the police in most states and territories and it’s also the colour used for highway signs that contain general information – for example those giving notice of rest areas and of exits where food can be purchased – whereas green signs on a motorway will be used to provide directions. So blue reassures in the context of the ad, eliciting welcome feelings. In contrast to the conservative blue signs, the blonde woman wears a modern, sporty, bright pink cardigan. It’s a colour – unlike, say, pale blue, which might also suit a blonde – with other connotations, and an older woman like the one we see in the ad might be making a statement in wearing it. It suggests she has alternative views.

I will return to again and again to the contrast between opposites used in this ad. So, for example, the plain packages of the goods on display offer contrast to the unsightly gaps between the shelves. These two elements combine to give the early shots of the ad a forlorn look and make you feel that something is missing. The woman, for her part, looks lonely and afraid; the pink of her cardigan is, moreover, feminine, underscoring how vulnerable she must feel all alone among the confusing array of products, none of which is what she is looking for. 

To add to the feeling of being disembodied, or in a dream, more disturbing information is delivered via the voiceover. The narrator refers, using his confident male voice, to legislative changes regarding the sale of painkillers. As Senior magazine relayed on 30 May: 

FROM Monday all modified release (MR) paracetamol products, such as Panadol osteo, often taken by osteoarthritis sufferers and other with chronic pain, will only be available from behind the counter at pharmacies. 

The Therapeutic Goods Administration made the decision to reclassify the schedule 2 medication to a schedule 3 (pharmacist only) from June 1, 2020, because of concerns around deliberate and accidental overdose.

The ad exploits changes in federal law designed to promote responsible use of a product that is commonly used by seniors (the woman in the ad looks to be aged in her late 50s or early 60s – about retirement age), and the drab setting underscores the unease people feel about using medications.

In the third shot the woman is shown front-on to the camera, but now she’s turning her head, scanning the shelves with their grey boxes, her relaxed facial muscles pulling down the corners of her mouth. While unsure of herself, she looks like a woman who can give a crisp answer to a question, and who doesn’t like feeling out of her depth. As she turns her head to the right (our left) – taking us back into the past in our imagination, into the realms of memory – her eyes slide in the same direction, emphasising forcefully the notion of “searching”. It is clear that there’s an answer to the woman’s problem, but so far she hasn’t hit upon it.

Added to the feeling of unhappiness the woman evokes in the viewer’s imagination are her big, dark eyes, their colourlessness merging with the grey shelves and contrasting with the bright pink cardigan she’s wearing. The contrast is designed to keep our interest, even as the colourless packages on the shelves lull us into a dream-state, but this first section of the ad lasts for approximately half of the available time – about seven seconds – and this protracted period of disorientation is powerful and compelling for the viewer.

On her left shoulder the woman carries a handbag and in the final shot of this section she is situated just within the right-hand half of the frame. When she finishes turning her head, forming a point of punctuation for this quick, efficient series of shots, most of the screen is filled with those boring grey shelves with their endless ranks of grey boxes. They surround the woman. “And why,” you can hear her asking herself, “are things so hard to find now that the law has changed?” Perhaps she had heard about the change as she was listening to the radio in her car … (She used to be able to go into her local supermarket and buy Nurofen Osteo in the cosmetics aisle when she picked up soap and toothpaste …)

At the bottom of the screen are two rows of fine print that you might have the time and inclination to read, and the lack of colour in the shots encourages you to do so. They say that the medicine being advertised in the ad may not be right for everyone. They also say that the medicine is for temporary pain relief. This is all fine in general, but as far at the woman in the ad is concerned the medication is absolutely essential – why else would she subject herself to such rigours? These pesky grey boxes! It’s impossible to find anything in this place!

From the shot of the woman in her bright pink cardigan we cut to a shot (see image below) showing shelves with ranks of identical grey boxes of painkillers. We’d seen boxes of drugs looking like these in an earlier shot, rows and rows of them on offer. But not the ones the woman is looking for.

You see a hand scanning from right to left (the tonic directionality showing that a question is still to be answered) and the tendons and bones in the back of the hand are clearly visible through her skin. It is a hand that has been carefully thought out as is the packet design of the boxes of painkiller which resembles that of the main competitor of Nurofen (but it is not the brand the woman is looking for). The main competitor being Panadol, which is made by GlaxoSmithKline, and which uses green on its packaging. 

At this point in time, it is the hand that is shown doing the thinking. It’s an intelligent hand, with the thumb cocked, the index finger pointed, and the three remaining fingers bent at the knuckle, as though finding the right box of painkillers were a matter of the utmost importance. This kind of definition of the problem faced by the woman will be familiar to people aged over 50, for whom the youthful luxury of a feeling of having unlimited time has been replaced by the necessity of selecting, based on experience, the appropriate form of activity for each segment of the day.

Visible in this shot, near the top of the frame, is a barcode such as you find on products displayed in retail outlets. It’s there to show that, despite the grey boxes, this is a real shop and this is a real situation such as any 60-year-old woman living with chronic pain might confront on any day of the week. Two more barcodes are visible each side of the woman’s wrist but they are abstract and impersonal, giving nothing away. The hand looks very much like it could be the hand of the woman we have become familiar with as our avatar – a person slim enough and blonde enough to be a fitting representative of everywoman (even us!).

The next shot (see image below) is fascinating not only due to its centrality. The woman stops scanning, looks straight ahead (still with her head and shoulders situated in the right-hand half of the screen, with her right eye at the centre line of the frame) and up pops her head, as if finding the right product had enabled her to levitate. The horizontal of the gap between the shelves behind her head bisects, in the middle of the frame, the vertical created by the shadow under the woman’s hair, to form a cross. A fitting symbol of suffering and redemption. The horizontals of the woman’s eyelids, her eyes, her mouth, and the two gaps between shelves behind her create a nice rhythm in pictorial form to accompany the woman’s sudden broad smile. She’s slightly narrowed her eyes, enabling the viewer to see her eyelids.

Before her eyelids had been invisible. The eyelids are important because they show that the woman is healthy and not puffy-eyed (as a person might be if they consumed too many medications). Now, the woman is so high that the top of her head is cut off by the frame. She’s high as a kite! And her eyes and mouth are so dimensioned and contoured to be almost the same shape as each other.

Note how the hair on her right shoulder is swept back, increasing the lightness of the imagery used to orient the viewer. The tan strap of the woman’s handbag declines to enter into a rhythm with the gap between the shelves, her eyes, her mouth, and the shadows made by her hair, and in this shot harmonises with her hair and with the pink of her cardigan. We are now at the ad’s midpoint.

It’s a point where certainty has been disturbingly delayed for seven seconds – an eternity in advertising time. The narrator now says, “Thankfully, there’s Nurofen!” The tone of his voice shifts to match the popping head of the woman in the pink cardigan, and lifts to a peak on the first syllable of the product name. Your mood instantly becomes brighter as the man emotes happiness with his voice. It’s a voice that is on the high end of the scale for men and whereas before he had been downbeat and factual – all that talk of frightening legislative change – now he is as surprised by fate as the levitating woman.

The next shot, showing a comforting array of boxes of the drug the woman has carefully and determinedly been searching for, appears precisely in tandem with the spoken word “Nurofen.” Perspective now goes not from the right-hand edge to the left-hand edge, but the other way: from left to right, which is subliminally comforting for the viewer. We are arriving at the conclusion.

To consolidate the achievement of a form of closure, the shot of boxes of drugs is quickly replaced – it shows for about a second – by an animation (see image below for its end state) that is labelled, in the top-right corner of the screen, “Dramatisation”; (honesty is important). Now, a range of things happen in quick succession in an ambience saturated with very bright colours. The rapidity and colourfulness contrast dramatically with the long sequences in the washed-out store aisle belonging to the first seven seconds of the ad. 

First up, you see a knee with the bones visible as though an X-ray were had been made of a leg. A red glow around the joint demonstrates that the people who make the drug understand how pain can be crippling if it’s severe enough. Then, from the left-hand side, at the bottom of the screen – the “real” zone – an image of the drug packet slides succinctly into place. You can almost hear it make a “click” as it comes to rest at a polite distance from the aching knee, with its calf muscle carefully outlined in white. 

The words “reduce inflammation” run in the voice-over as this happens, and then suddenly the words “relief of pain + inflammation” emerge in caps above the packet as a set of interlocking rings, with red on the outside and yellow in the middle, appear behind the knee and the words “… and relieve osteo pain …” are layered over the visuals by the male narrator, though the voiceover doesn’t end there and continues as the shot changes to the next one.

Establishing a link between pain and inflammation using the plus-sign is clever, hinting at the speed of the drug’s effect when taken in a suitable dose (which information will be on the packet). The rest of the voice-over’s sentence (“for up to eight hours”) arrives on top of the following shot.

The blonde woman is smiling broadly now, the ends of her hair lying on her pink cardigan. She occupies the right-hand third of the screen, and in front of her face holds up a packet of the drug. The colourfulness and her location in the shot – especially her eyes, which are in the top-right of the frame – combine to give this composition of elements a positive energy. Reinforcing this, the front of the packet of drugs is clearly visible (though it’s seen at an angle) so you know what she’s looking at. Behind the woman’s hand three shelves full of packets of the drug, their bright label in full view (this is what made the woman smile so broadly before), are clearly visible. Their fronts show the same three-ringed symbol as the graphic that came up behind the aching knee in the earlier shot, which had made explicit and unambiguous a link to arthritic pain.

“Switch to Nurofen,” the narrator says as the final shot appears (see image below). The bright white radiating glow coming out from the space behind the logo (made up of its distinctive triple ring of red, orange and yellow) on the idealised packet not only take up the critical central space of the screen that had previously been occupied by the worried-looking woman, they are also echoed by similar rays on the small bottle that is offered as a product packaging option for fussy consumers who might want to travel and hence want something a bit stronger than a cardboard packet.

My analysis is almost over. I just want to quickly note how the ad achieves the transition from the image of the now-smiling woman to the brand shot that closes it out. It is very clever, and uses the three rings of the logo in a compelling fashion.

As the woman stands in the frame with her packet of drugs – the acquisition of which being an achievement that fulfills her immediate goal – colours enter from the extremities of the screen (see image below) and zoom ecstatically toward the centre, the canonical splash ending up as the logo on the packet pictured in the image we saw before. 

Then, in black and red, the words “Switch to Nurofen” are visible at the top of the screen, in the ideal zone, and this message is underscored by the narrator’s voice, which says, “Switch to Nurofen.” The first syllable of this sentence is said in a high tone, with the voice descending in pitch to end with a neutral point in the middle of the narrator’s vocal range.

This ad is incredibly good and uses a full range of elements to achieve its goal: to convey a message about the importance of going to the pharmacist’s shop to get the painkillers that some older people might need to live meaningful lives. It’s a difficult subject to address on TV due to the negative connotations aroused by, for example, the law change. But the ad comes at the problem with alacrity and verve.

Nurofen is shown to be an alternative brand for the thinking woman. It is a brand of Ibuprofen made and marketed by Reckitt Benckiser, a British company that is publicly listed. According to Wikipedia Ibuprofen is a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug that was discovered in 1961 by Stewart Adams working at Boots UK Limited, and initially marketed as Brufen.

In the above I focus mainly on the secondary messaging that operates in addition to the words used in the voiceover. Almost like subliminal or hidden messaging, in subtle ways video and audio content affects the conscious mind as it tries to make sense of adverts.

IAG sign on tower two, Darling Park, Sydney

Consciousness is a filter automatically applied to sensory perception. The “socius” of postmodern theory is the layered physical ground upon which ideas are inscribed.

Or, as with this IAG (an insurance firm) sign on tower two of Darling Park – a development on Sussex Street, in Sydney – forming a palimpsest. Beforehand there was a sign for the professional services firm PWC, and when the designers ordered the signs to be changed out they were unable to match the exact shade of grey to obliterate traces of the previous occupant of this piece of marketing real estate. So you can still see how the one firm was pushed out by workmen handling the big letters of the second firm.

Sussex and Darling – the former being the name of a duke and the latter of a governor – belonging to the colonial era that preceded the one we now inhabit. Now, we give our principal institutions acronyms as names instead of noble monikers.

In the photo the remnants of the morning’s fog being burned away by the winter sun might remind the viewer of a Roman god devouring a human, like Goya’s ‘Saturn Devouring his Son’ (1823), a detail of which I saw on Twitter as I was editing this post. The crane at the top of the photo is installed on a different building, not the one I’m talking about in this post. Saturn was the god of renewal and dissolution and his symbol is the scythe; it’s fitting, then, that the tops of the buildings in this image are shaped like sickles.

Ad capture (01) – E45 cream

This the first in a series of posts that are designed to take a detailed look at TV advertisements. I want to slow down the experience and pay attention to what is offered to view between programs on the small screen. This kind of content tends to be considered unimportant or ephemeral.

In what follows I focus mainly on the secondary messaging that operates in addition to the words used in the voiceover. Almost like subliminal or hidden messaging, in subtle ways video and audio content affects the conscious mind as it tries to make sense of adverts.

This 15-second ad – coming after a promotion for a Network Ten cooking show, and before an ad for an insurer and one for a non-dairy milk substitute – starts with a mix of low-key and dramatic elements. You see words rendered in 3D on a glossy background looking like a display window that you pass on a street in the retail district, or else a museum diorama – which are displays so beloved of children.

Prominent are the words, “What’s new?” They are set in a modern typeface, in red and white, looking like the masthead of a women’s magazine. This portmanteau brand has its own website and belongs to a company called Now Screen (based in the Sydney suburb of Woolloomooloo) which has been around for 16 years. "E45" is a brand of skin care products from Crookes Healthcare, a subsidiary of Reckitt Benckiser.

To grab your attention, in the ad the word “new” is red as is the question mark, and the words slowly rotate, as though on a turntable, spinning so that the right-hand side of the assemblage comes toward the viewer. Reassuringly, the words are placed in the bottom half of the screen, but not too close to the bottom: there is room for the phrase to stand comfortably in the available space. The placement and appearance of the words gives them realism, as though, instead of digitally enhanced imagery, you were looking at objects that, with perfect artifice, had been formed out of some ideal substance and put on a clever mechanism, a tribute to your own ingenuity.

A reflection of the letters is visible in the ground in front of the words, and a white light is set over the background, so as to give a feeling of depth to the field on the screen in front of you. You feel as though you are looking into a landscape, and within these confines sit the words you read, with their promise of something both reassuring and novel. You feel as though there will be no nasty surprises.

Then again, there’s the little matter of those three additional words, in smaller type: “In skin health.” Should you be worried? With this segment a soundtrack uses the same words (“what’s new?”) but, this time, sung by youthful female voices. The stress is on the end of the phrase, and the tone rises to finish the delivery, emphasising the feeling that the singing women are asking a question. The congruence of the written phrase and the audio track is reassuring, but the fact that the movement of the 3D phrase is from right to left tells you that you should pay attention; we are at the beginning of something, not at the end.

Along with the singers is a simple, unadorned instrumental accompaniment, as if someone were playing a piano. “If dry or flaky skin …” goes the voice of the narrator, “is causing you frustration or embarrassment, try E45 cream.” At the same time as these words are being beamed into your living room you see a brown-haired woman sitting down to have daytime refreshments with two friends (see image below). She’s wearing a yellow sweater and as she gets comfortable in her seat – not really though, as we shall see – she turns her right shoulder toward the woman who is talking (and who wears a disturbing, red T-shirt). Behind the woman with glossy, long, brown hair are three windows filled with light – reassuringly, the same light we saw in the opening sequence – and the curtains covering them are translucent, like the white glow behind the letters we saw at the outset. The colour white is a trigger for positive feelings, and is used in several of the segments.

The Asian woman, on the right-hand side of the table, also has short sleeves on her garment. On the table in front of the women are clean glasses and a plate, possibly containing salad. There is also a flat plate that looks as though it contains biscuits but none of the food is very noticeable. The pale arms of the two flanking women are prominent, however, and are bent at the wrists as they reach in, one after the other, to nab food. Contrarywise, the woman in the yellow sweater, who is in front of the viewer, has her arms crossed. She’s covering up her arms, which are anyway invisible because of the sleeves of her sweater, and she is looking downward, shamefaced as the segment ends.

The next frame shows the E45 cream – sitting in an artificial field like the one used for the opening sequence – in place of the words and the question mark we had seen before. The shot of the cream is quickly replaced by video showing a woman putting cream in a thick, white impasto on her left arm, and then smoothing it in with her right hand, presumably in order to make the cream disappear (see screenshot below). We are looking over her shoulder, in a way similar to how, in a daytime soap opera, one character can be shown talking to another. The face of this unidentified woman is hidden outside the edge of the frame, though we can see her jaw and neck. Because of the white straps over her shoulders we can also see part of a singlet or some other form of undergarment; both shoulders are visible in this carefully crafted shot.

In the background are what look like louvres, wooden shields set in a rotating mechanism. By manipulating a control you can swivel them horizontal to open them, or vertical to close them; here they are set at an angle of about 10 degrees off plumb, so that light seeps in modestly from outside, flushing the space with a glow. You normally see louvres covering windows in standalone houses (apartments don’t usually have them) and the feeling of this shot is light, but secluded, as though privacy were important for the woman applying cream to her arm. She might be the woman in the yellow sweater, but there’s no way to know by viewing this segment. White is also the dominant colour in this scene. 

Lengthy warnings are set in small print at the bottom of the screen but it is unlikely that you will have time to read them, unless you make a screenshot. Though over the top of this segment of the ad are easily visible other words: “Relieves dry skin in eczema & dermatitis.” They give the company making the cream and promoting it on our televisions leeway to use images and sound inventively while not, in a narrow sense, claiming that its product will overcome such conditions. The feint lies in the use of the preposition “in”. If a different word had been used – say, “from” or “of” – a dissatisfied customer, one who had used the product and had not had their dermatitis eliminated, might have grounds for complaint. 

Next we get an animation showing blue bubbles rising to hit a wavy barrier – meant to represent the surface of the dermis – and bouncing dramatically off, heading back into the (putative) interior of the arm (see screenshot below). The bubbles, which represent moisture, bounce around lazily, as though relieved of the need to exit the body, glad to stay within the woman’s arm, in safety (like in a museum diorama). 

In the top-left of this shot is the name of the product, in a capsule-shaped field. The product name looks like marketing material that is routinely made by pharmaceutical companies in order to promote their products. Providing continuity, in the bottom-right corner of the frame are the words “What’s new?” 

The repetition of the phrase is reassuring, and so is the fact that the critical top-right zone of the screen is left empty. This indicates that there is nothing in what is being shown that prevents a viewer from reaching a happy future. This segment of the ad underscores the implication that it can be dryness, and not a genetic trait or an allergy, that is the problem, though dermatologists will, in some cases, get people with a skin condition to use a moisturiser.

Approximately 10 percent of the population is atopic – meaning they are more liable to eczema, hay fever, and asthma – so this cohort (and people who are worried they might belong to it) is being targeted by the ad, which preys on viewers’ insecurities. 

Before the end of the ad – which will feature a stack of jars, much like what you see in a pharmacy’s display window or in a department store – you see three women walking on a street talking and laughing (see screenshot below). It’s possible that they are the same women we saw before though the only one I was sure about is the Asian woman. The woman on the left might be the same brown-haired woman as the one with the yellow sweater in the earlier segment but here, instead of looking unsure of herself, she is laughing animatedly and she is wearing a loose, pink, patterned print dress with short sleeves. 

She’s a different woman, but the street – with its pavement, vegetation, and its fences – looks like a regular suburban street; there is nothing unusual about the scene. The glamour of the opening shot, with its magazine-style letters, has happily disappeared and now everything is quite normal. 

“Feel comfortable in your skin. Switch to E45,” goes the narrator as the women are replaced by a stack of jars. The implication being that women always use some form of cream on their arms each day – so why not a medicated one that is good for you as well as being unobtrusive? By the end of the ad even the question has gone away, like the cream as it dissolved into the skin of the woman in the nice suburban house with her cosy bathroom and its louvres.

Despite the warnings in the red shirt of the woman in the opening sequence, the fine print, and the sense of doom that someone who lives with, say, psoriasis, might feel when confronted by the ad, it engages with received ideas and promotes a product in a way that makes the idea of using it – just a few dabs on your itchy patch in the evening before going to bed, or in the morning before getting dressed – seem easy and anxiety-free. 

Like the cream itself, the ad offers relief from a form of stress – looking different from the people around us can be challenging. And unlike the demanding regime perhaps necessitated if you consult a medical specialist, despite the fine print in this ad you’re reassured that you might have a common problem that, with E45 cream, can be simply fixed. 

Using Netflix: A first glance

Login is badly designed but it’s true that I’m often grumpy and quick to make decisions without thinking too deeply about what I’m doing. I’m also typically inept when it comes to technology, especially what is delivered online. Early on Saturday morning it took me a good 30 minutes to subscribe to Netflix (easy enough) and to log in (a nightmare), including a live chat.

Getting a plan was quick and I completed this part of the process in about two minutes. I chose three films, two of which I had already watched and (somewhat) enjoyed, in order (as requested) to give the company an idea of my viewing preferences. These were ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ (2018, dir Jon M Chu), ‘Aquaman’ (2018, dir James Wan), and ‘The Irishman’ (2019, dir Martin Scorsese; I hadn’t seen this but had wanted to see it).

Once set up at my PC I went to the TV and turned it on. I then selected “Netflix” in the top-level menu shown after you press the power button on the TV’s remote control. Once I had done that I was confronted by an interface in Japanese as my daughter had been the person who had viewed Netflix on this device. So I had to scroll through the controls with my poor Japanese (I had never really learned to read the language despite living there for many years) to find the place where you log out.

After a few false starts I got there eventually, but then when I pressed the button to log in I was unable to change the email address used for this procedure. The password field was blank and there was a keyboard on the screen to use to punch mine in, but there was no way to change the login email address from my daughter’s email address to mine.

Frustrated, I went back to the PC and fired up live chat. The person who replied asked me the problem and I explained. He then got me to give him my TV’s model number (later he would ask me for the year of manufacture) but he didn’t seem to understand how to solve the problem, so I went back to the TV and clicked on “Reset my password”.

The TV said I should enter my email address so that a password resent link could be sent to me, so I dutifully plugged this information into the interface. Below this was a button saying “Confirm” but there wasn’t any other instruction so I just went back to my PC and refreshed the email client software using the “Send/Receive” button. I did this several times while telling the staffer what I had done and complaining that no email was forthcoming. When this had gone on for a couple of minutes, I went back to the TV and hit “Confirm”. Dragging my sorry carcass back to the PC, I refreshed the email client software several more times.

Then, after a lag, three emails arrived from the company, one of which had a link to reset the password. Using this I navigated to a web page, put in a new password, and moved back to the TV, where I plugged it into the interface.

I got in but would have to say the process was unnecessarily complex for a service that wants to get and keep subscribers. To prove that the company can do things well if it wants to, the emails they send are complete and attentive. Here’s what the email said that was sent after I added a phone number to my profile:

We've added your phone number ending in [redacted] to your account, as you asked. Your phone number will be used if you forget your password and for important account messages. 

This is very encouraging and as it should be. It’s absolutely what you would expect from a service of this kind as it adequately fulfills a real need. When I changed my password, the email I received said:

We’ve changed your password, as you asked. To view or change your account information, visit your account.  

If you did not ask to change your password, we are here to help secure your account; just contact us. 

Again, this is exactly what I would have expected to see. Why logging in was so difficult was harder to compute. I had had problems with my digital newspaper subscription but only while overseas (logging in via my iPhone required a bit of effort). It felt odd to be stymied at every turn in my own living room.

Once I got the thing working, however, I enjoyed the tailored home page where you can browse by type of program. The interface tells you what kind of program it is you are focused on. It might be a movie; if so, you see the runtime in the first line of the description. It might be a TV series; if so, you see how many seasons it ran for (Netflix seasons seem to have 10 episodes). Most episodes in a TV series seem to last about one hour. Some TV series are limited and others run for several seasons.

This sort of information helps you plan your time. If you have three hours to kill you might want to watch a feature film. If you only have an hour, you can select an episode from a TV series. Such information is available simply by moving focus to a displayed item – each item has an image, in the same way that, in the old days, video cases had a picture on the front – and part of the screen area is reserved for the display of descriptive data relating to the item in focus. Changing focus by pressing an arrow button on the remote control lets you see information for a different item.

Once an episode of a TV series has ended the next one begins to load, so if you want to exit you have to first press the “Stop” button. On your home page, the next time you log in, you can see TV series of which you have watched a few episodes, and if you click on the same item the next ep is set in a prompt, so you can immediately begin watching it. The database remembers what you have seen, therefore, and this is convenient.

Classification (“Action and adventure”, “TV series” etcetera) allows you to browse for new material on the basis of the image and description I’ve described. If you want to see what kind of material is available behind one of these icons, you simply use the remote arrow button to bring it into focus and you can see, at the top of the screen, an item’s description. You press the “Enter” button to select it or scroll with the remote to bring another item into focus. If you select an item, you still have to hit “Enter” at the next screen to start watching it.

You can add movies and TV shows to My List on the home page by clicking on an item when it is in focus, and scrolling to and clicking on “Add to my list”. To remove from the list titled “Continue watching” (also on the home page) movies you have started but didn’t finish (and don’t want to watch more of) you can go to the Netflix page on the web and, after logging in, visit the “Account” page. There, a YouTube video told me, you can see a page full of your viewing history. If you click on the icon to the right of the movie you want to unlist, it will be removed from the list on your TV after 24 hours.

One weakness is how Netflix needs to connect to the internet at the start of a session. You see a rotating circle, incomplete in parts, much as you see something with MS-Windows when it is updating software or logging out at the end of the day. This “busy” symbol is the same as you find on your PC. If the TV cannot find the server it is trying to access you get a dialog that allows you to retry. On one occasion I had to click on the “Retry” button to get access to the database. On another occasion, as a storm passed over the city, Netflix and Amazon Prime (which I signed up for yesterday) wouldn’t let me watch a movie. Then Netflix wouldn’t even show the home screen. Then I watched an episode of a TV series on Prime and went to bed. The next morning both were working fine.

After you have finished a Netflix session, you press the “Exit” button to go back to the TV’s main menu and, from there, you can go to Prime  or to free-to-view TV such as the ABC News channel. Snacking TV is best with free-to-view because you don’t have to commit a large chunk of time. There are some things that are good about the past, so if you have 15 minutes free you might view 15 minutes of a Netflix ep or, more likely in my case, I will just scroll through the channels available on free-to-view until I find a channel that doesn’t have an annoying ad for Ole or Trivago.

Ads are beautiful things and they tell you about community standards, but with excessive repetition they pall. I do, as a general rule, like ads for cars and furniture but ads for other types of products can also be good. Production quality is usually high, although I don’t much like the demonstration segments on the morning shows, and ads often have music which, even with the voiceovers and the sales pitch, can be enjoyable. At 30 seconds they are not unbearable and you can wait out the pain. Occasionally you are shown something useful, like an ad for a retail sale, and car ads are fun because they let me understand how each manufacturer is positioning itself in the market (I just put in an order for a new Toyota).

I get similar information driving. I see a Japanese SUV – we used to call them 4-wheel drives, but that moniker is not always accurate as not all of them, I have learned, have all-wheel powertrains – and I mentally note the brand and model, toting up numbers in my head to gauge which are popular.

So, ads are not always remote from personal experience, although I’m bored to tears by those for a Network Ten reality TV show that is currently on. My free-to-view routine has me watching Channel Nine in the mornings and Network Ten in the evenings. In the middle of the day I channel-surf but, now that I’ve got Netflix, I don’t have to resort to Seinfeld reruns (not that that’s such a bad thing …). At 4.30pm weekdays, though, I’ll still be watching ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’.

A need for a new profession: the personal brand manager

This post was written in the middle of September and sat unused on my hard drive for two months. But then I saw a tweet from futurist Ross Dawson at around 10.45am (Sydney time) yesterday that said, “Interesting piece in @TheAtlantic on the rise of ‘Personal CRM’ services to help you manage your personal relationships and how some people are using tech to keep in touch with those important to them - does it help or hinder relationships?” The Tweet came with a link to a story on the company’s website but I don’t have a subscription so I didn’t click on it.

Celebrities offer comfort. We gravitate to the names of actors, artists, musicians, writers, movie directors, poets (and criminals). We nestle in the warmth of the stories that surround them. Their personalities bring us reassuring certainties that are so different from the anxiety that the rest of our lives delivers in such abundance.

We turn sportsmen and -women and even our politicians into celebrities too. And don’t forget royalty! They allow us to spin reliable stories and share them with like-minded people, people who add to the feeling of security we crave as we navigate our ways through the thickets of life. Celebrities offer people a desirable prospect because they are not us. They are not, in our view, cramped by insecurities and by the difficulties of deciding, all the time, what to do with their time, their money, their energies.

We put them on a pedestal but crucify them when they disappoint us. If this happens, our response is out of proportion to the offense, we insult them and verbally abuse them and ostracise them until they become outcasts from the community.

Fame is thus a poisoned chalice. The bigger you are the harder you can fall. And by applying to celebrities (even some journalists and some scientists) a higher degree of scrutiny than we apply to ordinary people we make such people more careful about controlling what messages about themselves that are made public. They become paranoid about leaks and whistleblowers who might endanger their precious social cachet. Hence the severity of punishments for frivolously endangering it, which the state enforces through defamation laws. And hence the state’s penalties for people who reveal information that might embarrass any of its organs.

With politicians, a kind of balance is struck through the existence of freedom of information laws but in practice these are not always entirely successful for the person who is trying to uncover evidence of wrongdoing or of government malpractice. Objections to the stated request may be put forward on the grounds of secrecy or on the grounds that revealing the requested information could put innocent people at risk. Furthermore, the cost can be prohibitive, and if the release is judged to require too much time to carry out it can be refused on the grounds that doing so is not feasible.

Politicians and celebrities and sporting clubs employ public relations professionals – many of whom have been either trained as journalists or who have worked as journalists – to make it easier to control the messages that get out into the public sphere. Partly in response to this perception of obfuscation, whistleblowers, in turn, are celebrated and are given recognition by the community as protectors of freedoms. The debates that rage around such people are, however, often characterised by rancour as people express contrasting views.

Trust is easily lost and most large organisations have a problem maintaining it. People in the broader community respond by raising up their own, chosen celebrities, people whose use of social media has propelled them into popularity. People are loyal and unthinkingly support their heroes, and the cachet of being an “outsider” clings to such people even if they are successfully appropriated by the entertainment industry.

News about celebrities is often derided as meaningless but I think that this view is misguided. As I wrote in a post published on 25 May 2015, all news stories are proxies for larger debates. So a story about a celebrity who does something wrong can contain important messages, for example, about such things as trust (if the celebrity lied) or about sexual assault (if the celebrity raped a woman). We use such stories as important tokens that express things about ourselves and we share them with our peers as we go about our daily business and as we talk about what we did on the weekend or the evening before (watched a movie, read a news story).

Privileging a celebrity as an actor in stories that are meaningful for us is perfectly natural. Humans are social animals and language is innate so the creation of stories that help us to make the communities we need to survive is a species behaviour. In our stories we have protagonists who represent certain values and who embody certain things about ourselves and about our societies. We invest them with parts of us but we fail to do the same for ourselves. But unless we are a psychopath we are not the heroes of our own stories. Most people are beset by misgivings and doubts and search out ways to allay such feelings, even going so far as to create gods that they worship as all-powerful and benign and able to settle the confusion amid which they live their lives.

All of this is uncontroversial and should be common knowledge. But we need now to be able to make ourselves the heroes of our own stories, to give to ourselves the same quantity of belief that we give to celebrities and to gods. As we move on in time, and as we become more used to the capacity each one of us now has to publish our own stories, we need to be more able to fashion positive stories about ourselves that we can share, instead of just building up one celebrity or tearing another one down. We can choose to leave behind the comforting certainties offered by celebrity and embrace a more meaningful existence as, ourselves, people worth celebrating on the basis of our own, individual qualities.

In a sense this is already happening. It is happening along lines marked out by the trajectories drawn by identity politics. There are more and more memoirs being published written by people who are only remarkable on the basis of the stories that they are able to tell. These revelations of suffering and of challenges overcome are bought by ordinary people who want something authentic to use to divert themselves from the fear and loathing that they experience in their own lives. True crime, also, is very popular. And so we have started out on our journey toward fulfillment, to a place where we can leave behind the sterile and gratuitous search for meaning in the lives of others, so that we can find it in our own.

Perhaps now there is a place for professionals whose job it is to create and fashion a personal brand for individuals who are not particularly remarkable but who want to engage in a more meaningful way with others in the community on social media. A personal brand manager of this kind could talk with you over a period of a couple of days in order to establish the kinds of things that you want to represent online, and help to orient you within the available narratives so that you can choose one suitable for you, one that both authentically reflects who you are and that can help you to achieve your personal goals. They could then give you advise about how to promote suitable narratives on the various platforms that you use, such as Facebook and Twitter. And they could also provide guidance about what kinds of conversations to avoid.

This kind of professional could work for anyone and it could all be done over Skype or FaceTime. I had a service of this nature a year or so ago when I wanted to improve my LinkedIn profile. The woman I spoke with lives in California and she helped me to construct a useful personal profile on the site that would project my strengths in a way that is easy to read and comprehensive but that avoids some common problems such as verbosity and an excess of detail. The blueprint for a personal brand manager is already with us and the need for this class of person is real.