I was staying in a hotel recently in Adelaide, while conducting the Adelaide Symphony, and the walls of the lobby were scrawled with handwritten aphorisms. I will enjoy a belly laugh. I will have my cake and eat it too. I will be honest. I will play. I will make love not war. I will unlock my potential. I will believe anything is possible. I will swap worry for wonder. I will promise not to throw a bucket of white paint over this drivel. Sorry, that last one was mine, but really, what is this nonsense? It is verbal pollution and our lives are full of it. Everywhere you go these days modern corporations are bombarding us with little messages that are supposed to make us feel better about ourselves and as a consequence feel better about the products of these companies and then presumably buy more of them. But they just make me mad. 

The strapline of the ANZ Bank is We live in your world. Well unless the bank had its headquarters in Alpha Centauri, we can safely assume we already know that. So what is it meant to be telling us, that the bank is not a vast conglomerate, but just another decent person trying to get on in the world? I don’t notice the ANZ Bank trying to get a seat on the bus, I don’t see the bank buying groceries down at the supermarket, or standing in its own queue. The Commonwealth Bank went even further, creating its own poem written by M&C Saatchi creative director Andy Fleming. Can’t is a bad word, but can is much better – We can move forward, not back, We can find our own way, We can build, We can run, We can follow the sun, We can push, We can pull, and presumably we can approach the bank to loan us the money to pay for all this happy pushing and pulling. I would love to go to the Commonwealth and take the same approach when applying for a mortgage. I would bring my own poems and maybe a lute and a countertenor to sing them. With iambic pentameter I would charm the loans manager, till he (with tears in his eyes at the beauty of my words), handed over $600,000 with nothing more than a vague promise to pay it back at sometime in the future. 

The National Australia bank in its campaign ‘broke up’ with the other big three banks and announced that it was now ‘more give, less take’, but strangely enough when the RBA cut interest rates, the NAB didn’t pass the entire amount on either to its customers, undermining its own message. This is what is called ‘lipstick on the gorilla’ – you change the advertising but don’t actually change the culture of the organization, and to a wider extent it is all that is wrong with the modern world of corporate marketing, the gap between the glossy happy ‘can’ of the TV ad and the harsh reality of the real ‘can’t’ world of margins, percentages and profit. Some people call it advertising, I call it lying on a grand scale.