The invasion of previously pristine real estate at Elizabeth line stations has begun.
This is the directional signage at Farringdon station, formerly just a route diagram on a plain white background. Alas it now has an advert squished into the gap at the bottom, spreading up almost as far as the bottom of the 'g' in Reading. Arguably it doesn't get in the way of anything important, or arguably it's an unhelpful distraction.
It's part of a new campaign at several zone 1 purple stations, edging into spaces not previously used for ads. The strapline is Find a Gap See Where It Takes You, which may be a clever reference to the advert filling a gap at the bottom of the sign or it may not. The only people who've found a gap here are the marketing team, keen to make some dosh out of it, so it's all a bit meta and up itself.
And it gets worse, much worse. This is the new seatback on the platform where previously there were just stripy outlines.
This is just two-thirds of the advert, it continues for two more columns to the left. It's a generic office diary with entries including Project Kick-off, Creative Review and Dinner With Mates, all written on a grid of moquette colours. The real screamer is the aeroplane silhouette splashed across the lot, again urging you to find a gap in your busy schedule for a getaway. You could of course spend that getaway anywhere but, based on zero evidence, they really hope you'll want to go to Turkey.
And the worst thing is that it's going to be in situ for a year.
All of TfL's most nauseating commercial content is on Linkedin, and that's where I found this upbeat zinger.
It's someone's job at TfL to write this guff, just as there's a team that revels in doing deals with brands to distract us as we travel. Fair enough, it is their actual job, but the jolly zealotry they exude as they invade our eyeballs really grates. These are the same people, you may remember, who intend to introduce vast corridor wraps in Elizabeth line passageways just so long as the research says the moving images don't trigger too many customers' disabilities.
I don't know how much cash this year-long invasion will raise, but don't get your hopes up that it'll be transformative. Even Chase Bank's £2.5m deal to slap their logo on every Oyster pad is only enough to fund London's busiest bus route for seven weeks.
Personally I'd have gone for Find The Gap rather than Find A Gap because that'd be a much cleverer reference to an iconic TfL phrase. Although in truth I'd really have firebombed the entire concept and left our Crossrail stations unblemished, and I despair at whatever horror they might introduce next.
Well this is odd.
There are adverts all over the tube for the Falkland Islands Tourist Board, all featuring a cute rockhopper penguin, and the first thing I thought is "hang on, is this a wind up?"
It's not, it's part of a genuine campaign encouraging travel to the South Atlantic islands, which are admittedly extraordinary but hardly somewhere most people can visit. Flights are weekly, I understand, also you have to go via Chile rather than closer airstrips in Argentina, for obvious reasons.
Questions I immediately asked myself included "what are the dining options on an archipelago with a population of 3500?", "what's the accommodation like?" and "but what would I actually do there?". Birdwatching and walking are the obvious answers to the latter, also touring military sites with due reverence if that's your preferred focus. I love that the tourist board have produced 19 downloadable walking leaflets offering anything from a 45 minutes circuit to a 7 hour hike (also available from the Jetty Office).
As for accommodation seven nights at the Malvina House hotel can be had next month for £1568, whereas 'camp life' at Port Howard Lodge is considerably cheaper. During the day several basic cafes offer fairly basic refreshment (potentially fish-based), then Groovy's has the nightlife you crave and Street Fighter is tonight's film at the 55-seater Harbour Lights Cinema. It would certainly be the holiday of a lifetime, but I do wonder how many people will see these adverts on the tube and choose to go.
You could perhaps choose to visit on Peat Cutting Day, an annual public holiday on the islands, but that's the first Monday in October so you've just missed it (or have eleven months to make plans).
Well this is stupid.
These adverts are all over tube and train carriages at present, perhaps because winter is approaching and people are thinking about their health. It's for a Vitamin D supplement, this being the time of year when sunlight levels aren't necessarily enough to provide your daily dose. But a spray?
Tablets are normally the way to go, if you bother, or perhaps gummies or some multivitamin supplement. A spray does nothing clever except get absorbed direct, which is irrelevant, also it costs you more. But the advert chooses to show happy people spraying inside their cheeks like it's the cool thing to do, in the hope others will choose this more expensive route.
According to the project blurb (not here, online) the spray is "scientifically developed for superior absorption directly into the bloodstream", which is unnecessary. It's also a "convenient alternative to tablets and capsules", where instead of 'convenient' they could have written 'dearer'. Being more effective is effectively irrelevant, because as long you get the basic dose there's no benefit to getting more.
There is an increasing wellness trend to flog unnecessary extras to folk with disposable income, encouraging them to think they might be missing something the product could provide without ever directly saying that. And if that means people end up taking something daily, weekly or whatever for months, or even for life, that's a nice little earner for the company concerned.
You don't need to spray Vitamin D into your cheek, just as you don't have to eat oily fish and egg yolks to make up for missing daylight. Consider the cheaper just-as-effective alternatives, and think before you squirt.
