The Guide doesn’t tend to focus on adverts very often. We’re usually more interested in the popular culture those commercials are busy rudely interrupting. Besides, complaining about the most annoying ones – like the Confused.com ad where a succession of people squeeze the mouths into a disgusting O-shape and mime whistling for reasons unknown – only affords them the attention they crave. My primary life ambition is to live in a world where they stop making the Domino-hoo-hoo ads, so I’m hoping that ignoring them may help make that utopia a reality.
Still, sometimes it is worth paying attention in the ad breaks. After all, the best examples – Ridley Scott’s 1984-riffing Apple spot, say, or Jonathan Glazer’s Guinness ad – elevate the form to something close to art. Great ads tend to linger in the collective imagination, serving as shorthand for the era they belong to. Even when the ads aren’t coming close to doing that, they can still tell us something interesting about what messages our capitalist overlords are trying to get us to swallow. And if you have been paying attention to ad breaks over the past few months, you’ll likely have noticed a recurring message: artificial intelligence, far from being the thing that will ultimately turn society in to a giant pool of grey goo, is actually your friend.
