If you had a freeway billboard, what would it say?
I would not want to have anything as ostentatious as a billboard. It certainly wouldn’t be on a freeway unless I moved country as we have motorways in the UK! Also, how could you guarantee that the advertisement would reach the correct people? If it did, would it have the correct style?
A famous, though perhaps apocryphal quote, attributed to both John Wanamaker and William Hesketh Lever states, ‘I am convinced that one half the money I spend for advertising is wasted, but I have never been able to decide which half.’ There in a nutshell is the problem with traditional advertising. In practice, way more than half is wasted, whatever medium you choose. Surely, then, the ability to specifically target your advertisements to each individual on the Internet based on their searches and site visits has dealt with that problem? In all likelihood it has simply made it easier for some adverts to succeed while making others less likely to do so. I recently bought a shaver and for two weeks my feed was inundated with more adverts with links for shavers. Now, if it was a human being rather than an algorithm, the adverts would be for something like trimmers or haircare or skincare because a consumer is much more likely to buy a complementary item rather than the same item. I mean, how many people would buy multiple shavers?!
Over the last few months of 2025 I threw myself into a project based around Christmas Magazines Through The Years and I found the development of advertising absolutely fascinating. In the 1890s the advertisements were factual in the main and concentrated on giving the necessary information only, namely product specifications and price. There were two interesting exceptions, however, which both pointed the way forward. Cadbury, back in the day when the company was owned by a Quaker family and produced decent chocolate at a decent price, focused on the provenance of the chocolate and the way that the company followed its values through from the countries that supplied the cocoa to the way that the bars were made in Birmingham. Nowadays, of course, they have no guiding principles apart from profit above all else, and the chocolate is becoming more expensive and of worse quality. Still, at least they are not producing American standard chocolate which is unquestionably the worst in the world!
The other advert was Bird’s Custard Powder which used a humorous advert featuring a playful cook. It set in place the innovative humour that characterised British adverts for at least a century on from that 1896 magazine.
Nowadays, the humour has been largely lost with a few exceptions and replaced by a cynical ’emotion’ that is designed as if by computer to wring tears out of consumers. The problem is that consumers are wiser to the manipulation of their feelings than they were and those advertisements are suffering diminishing returns or being parodied.
The heyday of the UK TV advert was probably the 70s and 80s where humour and innovation were at the forefront of the industry. You had adverts that used chimpanzees, robots, straws and classical music! It was aimed at making the customer remember the brand when they were shopping. It worked with the Smash Robots which advertised a particularly awful powdered mashed potato which tasted entirely of powder and never of potato! Without the robots I doubt it would ever have become a favourite with households up and down the country.
So, although the advertising industry has evolved in terms of the technology it is using, it has significantly regressed in terms of the content it is producing. The only time you might see innovation, humour and true emotion is at Christmas where so many adverts are now events. However, even they are simply becoming repetitive and the innovations are starting to get fewer and further between as AI and algorithms take over. Will we see another golden age? Never say never, but it completely depends on the advertising agencies taking human control of the products and not outsourcing it to computer systems. It certainly seems unlikely at least in the next few years.
Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?
I spend the bulk of my time in the past, both on this blog and away from it. There are a few reasons for this and this post is an opportunity to look at them in an attempt to organise my thoughts on this matter.
First of all, I don’t look at the past simply because it was a time that I enjoyed. Often, at Secondary school especially, I had a miserable time. However, as I get older I want to understand how and why my experience there, and during other times, have impacted my personality and approach to life for better and for worse.
Second, as I get older I find myself not only wanting to return to things I enjoyed when I was younger but also to gauge the effect those things have on me now. I tend to remember events in my childhood with more clarity than most people in any case so the anecdotes and events are seen with far more accurate recall than the majority of people. However, there is one of the interesting aspects of Memory. Someone else with the same level of recall could either have forgotten the event or they remember it in an entirely different way. So that recall is only accurate for me and as such is heavily edited by my mind over the years.
Third, I love enveloping myself in old music, movies and TV because it makes me feel younger when I am doing it. There is a lot of evidence that people with dementia can access old memories and also evidence that people who have aged, even without dementia, can reverse the physical effects of age by being immersed in the past. I remember watching a documentary where a group of older and infirm men were given a physical test before entering a house, then taken back to the 1950s and completely immersed in the decade. When the physical tests were repeated at the end of the experiment they had all reversed many of their previous signs of ageing.
Finally, as I will never be asked to write my autobiography this is a way of capturing my life in all its aspects and maybe leave something of myself for my loved ones to read so that they might understand me more.
What is the greatest gift someone could give you?
When thinking about gifts that could change our lives, my mind tends towards financial gifts. That is because we have never been particularly affluent, although thanks to my wife we are comfortable enough to be able to afford me the opportunity to slow down. However, security comes from more than gifts or lottery wins. It comes from the freedom to do what you have always dreamed of.
The greatest and most important gift that someone could give me would be self confidence. It’s something I have never had and it’s something that I know has held me back over the years. I can have lots of people telling me that I am good at what I do but I am unlikely to believe it. A number of my former friends and colleagues have, or appeared to have, iron clad self confidence and they have got much further in their careers than I ever could. I know my career could have been much more successful if I had believed in myself more. Unfortunately it is a way that the brain works that is, I believe, innate. If you are a self confident person you will assume that if something goes wrong, it’s nothing to do with you because you are brilliant. I have met many of those people over the years and they succeed while the people with them stay put.
So, if my fairy godmother is listening, even at this late stage, I want iron clad self confidence please, together with an apology for waiting so long before giving it to me!
What colleges have you attended?
Clearly the person who decided on this prompt is American. It’s the only place, as far as I am aware, where university is referred to as college. In the UK, there are Sixth form colleges which are more relaxed versions of schools. In these colleges, students are often taking more practical subjects somewhat similar to the old technical colleges of the post war period. There are also some Public Schools in the UK which are referred to as colleges, most famously Eton. In another example of the divide between the UK and the US, Public Schools are the name we give to our private education institutions!
When it comes to Higher Education, we used to have very much a two tier system. When I studied for my Economics degree, I did so at Staffordshire Polytechnic. The Polytechnic system was a very good way to broaden access to Higher Education in the UK in the late 60s onwards. They took students with lower A Level results or mature students like myself (mature referring to those who had spent at least five years out of education, definitely not behaviour in my case!) who universities would not even look at. Nowadays, all the old polytechnics are referred to as universities, including Staffordshire University in Stoke on Trent. It has removed the official division between the two, but students, teachers and parents are aware of which universities are long standing and which changed their name in the 90s and 2000s. I think it’s perhaps gone too far in the UK with 50% or so of school leavers being accepted into higher education and a relaxation of standards shall we say! However, the way that the Polytechnic system democratised education was very important and my journey through life would have been utterly different without it. The degree was the reason I was able to become a teacher and go to Japan, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia and Australia and the reason my opportunities were expanded beyond working in an office.
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 