branding the planet
Kentucky Fried Chicken has apparently taken the novel step of branding the planet itself with a giant KFC logo in the southern United States. One of KFC’s soulless marketing drones makes the following vacuous remark:
The Colonel is truly a global icon and we want everyone in the universe to see KFC’s new look of the future.
Oh good. Because if alien observers are watching the planet, they’ll be fascinated to see that Colonel Sanders is now wearing an apron not a jacket. If we’re lucky perhaps they’ll just leave quietly rather than nuking the whole planet to stop us from branding other items in the cosmos.
A couple of pictures and a video of the thing can be found here. Ordinarily I think such things should be ignored – talking about it is just what they want, and fast food joints seem to be relatively savvy when it comes to generating Internet hype – but there seems to be something fundamentally sick about a civilisation that puts a logo for a fast food joint, or any kind of logo, on its actual planet. Fight Club predicted this kind of thing:
When deep space exploration ramps up it’ll be the corporations that name everything: the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.
Apparently we don’t even have to wait for deep space, we now live on Planet KFC. Brought to you by the same people who suggest that one day soon we might witness billboards in space which appear as large as the moon, effectively meaning that there will not be one place on the surface of Earth that one can go without being subjected to Nike ads.
This provokes the question – should we consider developing some sort of right not to view advertising? For instance, should advertising be restricted to ‘commercial’ areas? Libertarian instinct suggests that this is would represent unneccessary interference in private affairs on the part of the government. But consider, for example, whether sound advertising which was audible from anywhere outdoors would be acceptable. Why then, is visual advertising so different? And do we truly want to create a world where commercial branding is literally everywhere?
[Originally sighted on Slashdot]
‘besides, who knows if extraterrestrials even have fingers’
yes. that about sums it up doesnt it.
brilliant blog. love it.
as to the answer to your question, i think bill hicks summed it up perfectly: ‘if you’re in advertising or marketing, do the world a favour and kill yourself now’.
;P
Yay Bill Hicks! His untimely death seems almost biblical, if you know what I mean. Like Hendrix, JFK and Jeff Buckley. And that other guy, what’s his name, Jesus.
It’s quite upsetting that we have huge corporations who are prepared to dedicate their massive resources to completely moronic marketing ploys from which it is virtually impossible to escape. For example, what about those people who ride around on mopeds towing ads behind them? Is there any more demeaning job (maybe it’s a step above “dressed in a chicken suit waving at cars on the side of the road” I suppose)? Or a bigger waste of petrol?
When I did economics we learnt about this mythical time in the long-forgotten past when people bought things based on needs and wants. Today it seems that people only buy things based on psychological subterfuge and artificially induced desires.