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» Bingo: just for Tyler's mum?
Bingo: just for Tyler's mum?
While relentlessly butting into your consciousness in order to sell you things you don't need (and would be better off without), the advertisers select from a menu of tricks. Such ruses include: cajoling you into jumping onto a bandwagon lest you feel the shame of being left out; offering glittering generalities which appear to make strong claims but in fact dodge legal troubles by claiming nothing (Healthy-LOOKING hair? MAY reduce the APPEARANCE of wrinkles by UP TO sixty percent?); creating a sense of false urgency in order to make you worry about a vanishing opportunity to buy the useless piece of crap being sold to you; appealing to a plain folks notion that the pointless geegaw in question is for people like you.
The last of these tricks would appear to take a bit of thought. Would you really use it to promote something seen as aspirational? Surely if the status symbol being sold is a luxury item that requires you to spend money you don't actually have in order to impress people you don't actually like, then any people seen enjoying the banal glow of brief satisfaction which it confers ought to be presented not as people like you but as people you'd like to be: wealthier, more attractive, more sophisticated, better dressed, taller, slimmer, fitter and with better hair and teeth. You're stupid, you see? Easily suggestible. Somewhere inside your fearful little brain is a combination of chemical reactions which has you believe (only until you've actually made the purchase) that if you buy that watch, car or handbag then you will somehow be suffused with all those markers of ease, success and confidence.
But luxuries aside, the plain folks thing works for all sorts of goods and services. Yes, that old duffer wittering on about pottering in the garden with the grandkids and not leaving any funeral expenses for your loved ones to deal with.... that's you, that is. That busy mum stocking up on fish fingers that even fussy eaters will agree to ingest without tears and tantrums... that's you, that is. On and on. They know into which part of the demographics filing system their product is being forced. They know that the consumerbots in that segment have been programmed to buy certain clothes, haircuts, houses and kitchens. So that tells them what kind of lifestyle to represent on screen when using that plain folks trope. Oh look, that carefully programmed brain of yours says, that thing is used by people who are just like me. If I buy it I will neither be looked down at as some sort of chav nor laughed at for having ideas above my station.
Look at the gambling addiction industry, for example. As it continues to normalise the transfer of hard-earned salaries onto the balance sheets of giant gaming corporations, the various forms of the vice are associated with the various target demographics. Simple stuff: betting on football is male, matey, blokey and one suspects that the word banter is never far from the mind of the "creative" types at the ad agency. Online bingo, meanwhile, is natually sold to women. Specifically, it is sold to working class women. Cheeky Bingo, for example, show an animated world of modest terraced housing and use a chirpy northern accent in their voice-over. Jackpotjoy not only use loveable Cockney Babs Windsor but also draw on her Carry On past by dressing her in a historical costume and having her cackle at the odd double entendre.
What, then, to make of this effort on behalf of BingoPort? These women don't live in small terraced houses in the north of England! They're not married to plasterers, van drivers or whatnot! They don't have children named Tyler or Charmaine! Look at them! They wear scarves and pearls! They drive Chelsea tractors! They don't play bingo!!!
Or is bingo now about to cross the class divide which for ages wasn't supposed to exist but which now so very obviously can be seen not only to exist but to continue to be a major source of preoccupation for the English?
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