Erving Goffman once said that the most sophisticated forms of advertising are those that are “half-finished frames” which invite the consumer to participate by filling in their own picture. Now, far be it from me to be critical of Professor Goffman, but I think that he may have got the word ‘sophisticated’ confused with the word ‘contemptible’. Take a look at the Josh Brolin being all broody and twatish in the ‘I am Mercedes-Benz’ campaign:

Having a car advert that doesn’t actually show the fucking car has long been a blight on our terrible terrible excuse for advertising industry, but this one has a certain element of Goffmanism to it that makes it all the more, well, shit. In positing a “half finished frame”, I guess Mercedes are attempted to allude to our sense of wonderment and style, and when we fill in the gaps in a product, we are filling them in with the way we want to see the product (which is generally in a way which is good and makes us want to affiliate with, and maybe buy the product). A Goffman reading of advertising ridicules advertising that is matter-of-fact, left to the likes of Skoda and Ford.

This ‘creative’ style of advertising, letting us fill in the gaps, is, however, simply lazy. Why won’t you tell us about the performance of the car? Maybe because its so inefficient it it’s planet-destroying skills makes Unicron envious? Maybe because the price is only affordable by Tory-voting, Eton-educated, gold-snorting, horse-shagging cunts? Get real please. Tell it like it is. We deride politicians for PR and dressing up the truth so why do we accept it from our advertising? It’s insulting. And getting a jumped up B-list Hollywood celebrity with so much drugs in his system he can’t wank properly without getting scared that his baby gravy will morph into some sort of giant Mercedes-Benz and chop him up into little bits, is a very stupid way to spend an advertising budget.

So next time you find yourself ‘filling in the gaps’ of some new-fangled advertising campaign which shows a car being showered by purple pencils while a semi-naked midget with clown make up on slowly morphs into an exhaust pipe and then fires fillets of shark meat from a bazooka toward the camera, just remember you are watching some ad-man’s coke-fuelled vision that he probably came up with while gang-banging a 17-year old boy in a Park Lane hotel having just been on a 56-hour drink and drug bender. Maybe you’ll think twice.