The future of advertising - 11 June 1993

A hair-raising item came down the pipeline a couple of days ago, that I read over twice. The first time, I thought it was a parody of one of one of the more outrageous fashions or movements of our time, but it comes to us from a distinguished professor of journalism that Berkeley in California adopted, Timothy Ferris, who's been keeping up with this really hard to believe movement.

He gives dates and places and names and quotes, well known business magazines and I'm sorry to say that everything he reports appears to be on the level. So you rightly and impatiently ask "what is it?" – quote, "the most ambitious marketing endeavour ever contemplated", the industry magazine Advertising Age calls it.

It is an idea conceived by something called Space Marketing Inc, it proposes to put into orbit illuminated billboards about a mile in width that would then go on floating around the globe and would presumably give a new meaning to the occupation of star gazing. A variation of this ingenious gimmick has been conceived by a gentlemen who represents what I should normally guess to be a joke corporation, invented by a nightclub stand-up comic, it's called "Bird-vertising Corporation" and, an officer of it says, there are billions of birds in the world and virtually all of them have dull looking bellies, what he calls dishwater-dull bellies, so what does Mr Tar the advertising wizard propose to do about it?

Well, to begin with he's releasing 300 doves that carry on their dishwater-dull bellies minute emblems or logos of who, of what, of whom – Gucci. And if that works he foresees the day when our skies from Yolkahama to the Kyle of Lochalsh will be dark or rather bright with advertisements or as this enterprising man puts it he'll "make up for the lamentable fact of millions of square feet of non-utilised feather space".

There's already no imaginable limit to what some advertising companies or their researchers are plotting. Professor Ferris writes without hesitation – no hiding behind "allegedly" or "it is reported that" – he says, and I'm quoting his words, 'researchers at Cerulean Systems in Tacoma Washington, that's the State of Washington on a Northern Pacific Coast are seeking ways to genetically engineer fish, so that corporate emblems will appear just behind the gills.

There's an outfit in Barstow a desert fringe town in California that's playing around and they've done early experiments with the idea of downwind advertising, I'll say that again: sound, words, phrases projected into the atmosphere from specially constructed sound windmills and carried downwind by an atmosphere three miles wide. Three miles you understand is only the beginning, if this thing really gets going, no reason why these brilliant researchers shouldn't have miles and miles, the whole county soothed or afflicted with a voice booming or whispering for hours at a time bubble fizz is good for you it's soothing, it's new.

The first experiment was done by projecting into the air a phrase advertising a perfume, it was effective enough to alarm a farmer three miles away when he thought he heard, he did, a voice crooning the perfume's name, a voice from where? From nowhere, certainly not from God. Though there are worse, grosser ideas being acted on that I won't go on about, I can only hope to be here and sentient and applauding when the first test case of an outraged citizen comes up to the Supreme Court and his case against seeing nothing but ads in the autumn sky or hearing things he doesn't want to hear coming from nowhere when his case is upheld by the court and the advertising company is ordered to desist for having violated a citizens constitutional rights. What possible rights could those men of 1787 had in mind?

Well, I mentioned I elaborated last time on the marvellous foresight of those first Americans or rather the deadpan ingenuity of the Supreme Court, present and to come, in finding a phrase in the Constitution that silences or punishes everything from restaurants that won't let in blacks to an undertaker who decides to go into the insurance business. Can't be done, I suppose, in the case of the assault on our senses threatened by using birds and fishes and the skies for visual and sound advertising. The Constitutional right most people would claim would be invasion of privacy or in Britain of privacy. Everybody talks these days about keeping the government out of this and that, out of the airline business, out of the bedroom and solemnly intoning invasion of privacy. There is no such right mentioned in the Constitution. When a distinguished federal judge who was up for confirmation as a justice of the Supreme Court, Robert Bork, when he kept reminding and insisting before the confirming committee that the Constitution said nothing about privacy they were appalled, they turned him down.

But if you're beginning to get alarmed that you might have no defence against the genetic engineering of fishes in the interests of selling a detergent or a laxative, fret no more, you maybe sure the Constitution will come through – cruel and unusual punishment is only the first of the Constitution's phrases that come to mind – it might do very well, I hope so.

I think it's only fair to take a week off from President Clinton or poor Bill as even sympathetic editorial writers are calling him. After my last talk bemoaning the case of the $200 haircut, there was a brief pause and then the president – and I make this brief – nominated a brilliant black woman, a law professor to be assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Rights Department. From her many academic writings, it appears that in the main she wants to go beyond the Constitution's rock-bottom concern with individuals and invent or assert group rights, she leans for instance to preferential treatment for blacks to make up for 200 years of injustice, she wants blacks as a group to have in some cases a veto over majority laws.

In another fateful passage, she wrote that black leaders if they were elected with the majority of white votes not primarily by black voters, such people she's written are not authentic black leaders. This is inflammatory stuff and if the Senate had voted her in and she began to carry out these ideas in civil rights cases, it would have become alarmingly clear to a lot of people, people of goodwill that we'd be reading a recipe for social mischief for endless bitter legislation if not for social chaos.

Well the president had never read her written opinions before, he picked her chiefly because she was an old valued friend of him and his wife when they were all at law school at Yale, so he read them and with an embarrassed little speech he thereupon withdrew her name. She thus became the third woman he'd chosen to be head or assistant head of the Justice Department whose name he subsequently had to withdraw, he didn't even wait for the Senate to knock them down. Three out of four, the one who came through is Janet Reno, the Attorney General.

Well, as President Clinton soldiered on, I couldn't help thinking this week of Prime Minister Clement Attlee's remark about Harold Laski, the awesome academic who knew the entire history of democracy, Labour politics the lot. In the Labour landslide of 1945, he became Chairman of the Labour Party and blushingly launched into a new career as a practitioner of all the things he professed so well. He was a flop. Attlee made a typically short crisp comment; one thing, he said, about Harold, never got the hang of it. The walls of the White House have been seen to shudder slightly this week as old and wily politicians on Capitol Hill reluctantly suggest the same line about poor Bill.

Last week, on a spring day on a great campus shaggy with foliage, I was at a ceremony which ended with the granting of honorary degrees to eminences of various sorts, the last one's name was called out and it was a poignant moment when 22,000 people young and old rose to their feet and stood in silence for a minute. The degree was awarded posthumously; the dead recipient was the late Arthur Ash the first black world tennis champion, a man who had the atrocious ill fortune to receive some years ago after a heart operation a transfusion of tainted blood and developed Aids. He died of it in February. He lived the last two years un-self pityingly with much wisdom with unassailable dignity.

He gave the rest of his active life to all the issues of the day that affected him and blacks, he did not expect preferential treatment but he wanted to make the path for equal opportunity smoother, against militant friends he deplored violence in civil rights campaigns and stayed in the face of much criticism with the attitude of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, he was a religious man too, touched many faiths, he didn't mind being thought at one with even Republicans who deplored crime, drugs, floundering education, broken families and the decline of religion. He was very quiet but firm as a rock about these beliefs and he was, as even his crusading critics, granted essentially a decent man. All things considered, he could be said to be a credit to his race provided you add the reminder, the human race that is.

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