Adversarial advertorial

Adverts usually annoy me (I will not “Go Compare” for any money now) but I’ve seen a few recently that have made me smile:

"If Orange Wednesdays were a dinosaur they’d be called Awesomeasaurus."

[At a service station] "Drench: it’s what the woman in your SatNav drinks."

The best one isn’t real but has the ring of truth:

The thing is, I’m not going to change to Orange whilst my own phone deal is so good, and I’m not going to buy Drench whilst Ribena is on sale. So have these adverts succeeded? Probably not.

Where this all gets serious for me is with the news that The Times is to start charging for access to its online content. For anyone with even the slightest leaning to the left, the M-word looms menacingly. Considering him to be the personification of capitalism’s bankrupt morality makes me flinch at the very idea of giving any money to the owner of The Times, Rupert Murdoch.

I’ve been perfectly happy to read his newspaper for free (ignoring its anti-BBC rants) as it has some of my favourite columnists. The theory has been that I pay for this by noticing the adverts and responding to them but in fact I use Adblock Plus to keep them off my screen, so I can hardly complain that Murdoch wants to find another way to make a profit. The actual news I can probably read elsewhere, with whichever bias I prefer (they all have one, don’t kid yourself), it’s the comment I’ll be paying for. And that’s probably right: workers deserve wages, after all. Just don’t tell the guys at Facebook that.