Don’t #9 — PHRASING.
Content warning — includes discussion of suicide and depression. And Ketchup.
There is no shortage of ‘badly phrased adverts’. Adverts for ‘braille products you’ve never seen before’. Claims that salespeople won’t say ‘No’ because ‘they don’t say the N-word’. Educational products using the wrong ‘their’.
Some of these are idiotic — presumably the result of overworked copywriters or designers not thinking about what they’re doing. Some of those Google claims to be ‘mistakes’ look to me like deliberate attempts to be controversial to gain coverage. We can argue about the value of this — all I know is that I remembered the Sega joystick ad long after the MegaDrive stopped being sold.
Point being, I’m always suspicious when I see an ‘accidental’ mistake or innuendo in an advert, because I assume it’s likely deliberate.
But sometimes, you see a piece of copy or an image where the immediate association your mind makes is so unexpected, you start to wonder — am I the only one seeing this?
Earlier this year, MetroUK ran a series of ‘advice’ pieces across Twitter, and presumably the rest of social media. They seem to have run since February at least, and are in some kind of collaboration with Tesco and/or the Financial Standards Authority. The advice is rather odd. As they linked up with Tesco they clearly can’t suggest ‘buy less stuff’, but some of the advice seems rather contradictory.
The tip video on the right explains how you can save money by filling up with carbs instead of ‘expensive items like meat, fish, and poultry’. So next time you see someone complaining that poor people eat low quality food, you can explain that it was Metro suggesting you fill up on plain pasta — which is apparently ‘nutritious’.
The video on the left, on the other hand, suggests that you can save money by freezing any fresh herbs that you’ve bought before they go off.
I’d argue that if you’re struggling to afford £3 for some chicken breasts, you’re probably not buying fresh basil to go with them. It’s a little like suggesting someone saves money by not getting the leather seat covers for their Porsche, and just sticking with the standard ones.
Then it carries on.
In my teens and early twenties, I suffered from severe depression and suicidal ideation. I had incredibly low self esteem and certain phrases and ways of thinking would easily trigger me, to use a modern parlance.
I’m fully willing to accept that this may be me imprinting my own thought process onto a perfectly acceptable wording, but when I see references to ‘the easy option being your only choice’, I think back to those teenage years. I’m instantly put into the same frame of mind — of suicide being the only way of stopping the pain I was feeling. Of it being the easy way out of the torment I was going through.
I tweeted asking if anyone else read it that way. One response agreeing, nobody offering an alternative viewpoint, so it might not be universal but at least someone else could see where I was coming from.
I know, this is just some dumb money advice. I know, ‘stop buying takeaways’ is a standard bit of advice, but like ‘try freezing your herbs’ it would have been useless for me at a time where I wasn’t doing either. Of course, I also couldn’t batch prepare because I was living in a shared house with half a shelf in the fridge to my name, so prepping 10 portions of curry wasn’t really an option.
London is one of the most expensive cities to live in, and the divides between the well-off, the just about managing, and the struggling to survive aren’t that great. I struggled for years in a dead end job that refuse to train or promote me, and would regularly end up in my overdraft at the end of each month — and that’s without buying takeaway, going to the pub, or developing the coke habit a lot of my uni friends had.
Do you know what helped? Getting a better paid job. Getting a partner and moving in with them so the bills got split. Even then I only really got into a good financial position once the pandemic hit and I wasn’t having to pay to commute into work.
Being broke, and desperate for advice, puts you in a difficult emotional position. I’m fully aware I might be being too sensitive and seeing things that aren’t there, but when you tell people who are barely hanging on that ‘sometimes the easy option feels like the only choice’, only to volte-face into ‘why not delete Deliveroo?’, it feels both like you’re not taking the situation seriously, and that the trials of those in poverty are somewhat of a joke.
Again, I’m fully prepared to be told that I’m reading to much into this. After all, Metro would never try to make a story out of someone taking words out of context.
Now, a less kind person might argue that this chap has such a porn-addled sex-obsessed brain that he can’t see the word ‘squirt’ without thinking of porn. I’m not entirely sure where ‘shake’ and ‘squeeze’ come into it though.
Still, it seems clear that one person’s misinterpretation of a piece of marketing content is sufficiently serious enough to base an entire article on. I thus feel no shame at all in saying:
METRO — STOP TRYING TO PERSUADE POOR PEOPLE TO KILL THEMSELVES. YOU DISGUST ME.
Don’t is a semi-regular series wherein I delve into the minds of communications experts and find them totally empty, even when I bang the back of their heads a few times to get the last few drops out.