I know that Toddy and co reckon cities are for surfers, but I still found this image at the entrance to the Telstra shop in Brisbane (Toowong to be exact) weird and un-nerving as I passed it recently.
And maybe I’m missing something, but it just doesn’t seem to make sense on any level!
1. It’s on the carpark side of a multi-level shopping centre in the middle of a city.
2. It’s in Brisbane. BRISBANE! A river-centric city that is indeed pretty, but is also hard to describe as a city of/for surfers.
3. This image is used to advertise a company that provides, develops and promotes telecommunications – home phones, mobile phones, internet infra-structure and connections – which seems to be a little dis-connected when placed against that image. Telstra can only survive by us connecting to other people and ideas through (not-at-all-waterproof) technologies that are actually the objects that I most love leaving behind when I go into the ocean.
I suppose I am most uncomfortable about is the juxtaposition of this image of someone being in the moment and experiencing something, as opposed to the ways we communicate to other places and times through phones and the net. Not that I’m saying that is a bad thing, just that I don’t find how this image says very much about this company and its products.
But then again (and this is a problem that I think about a lot but have, as yet, written about very little), sometimes I find that I am surfing more online than I am in the water. And I don’t mean in a ‘surfing the net’ way. I mean the ways that I am involved with and engaging with surfing. Reading, writing, thinking, blogging, watching films, researching, looking things up for fun… these things take me out of the water and onto the net, and for a while earlier this year I realised how far I had come from mainly doing surfing to just reading and writing about it*. Sad isn’t it!
So, perhaps, well… maybe that’s the connection between this telecoms company and surfing - doing and reading and thinking and being and relationships all get convoluted and swept up into a complex life and lifestyle that switches between feeling things and thinking about them?
It’s making my head hurt – but then again, it could just be the computer screen.
*I swiftly amended that by the way and have swung so far in the other direction that now I have to remind myself to read and write about it at all!!
you just feel like you’re there huh? out in the blue yonder thinking about this mobile phone company and asking ‘how are my T2 shares doing?” What a company! What a corporate vision! What marketing! Second to none! One more exclamation mark!
perhaps one can think too deeply about the motivations of Advert execs that think very little:
surfing is ‘cool’; surfing is ‘soulful’; surfing is’Australian’; so gimme that image and i will stick my brand on it ta very much.
I have seen a surfer with a mobile in the water at Bondi.
I have also seen a surfer wearing an ipod strapped to his arm in some waterproof housing affair and buds firmly planted in ears so he could he could not hear me calling him all sorts of names .. again at Bondi.
more proof that Bondi is surfing’s Sodom and Gomorrah
Ew.
what a waste of buds. smoke em don’t put em in your ears. Ew too.
People sitting on surfboards (I hesitate to call them ‘surfers’) in the water chatting about how great it would be if they could bring their laptop out the back, their phone, their board meetings (and I mean like the CEO type of board, not the fibreglass/epoxy/foam/whatever they make them from these days kind of board) and so on. I’ve heard it at Manly and I’ve heard it at Bondi.
And the ad? It’s obvious. If you try to escape from the clutches of Telstra and get a new line, your internet is down for 5-6 weeks. During which time, you have no choice but to go surfing somewhere far away. Reality is your stuck with Telstra and their sharks keep circling.
(Ahem, I just looked at the ad again and that ‘shark’ is the dude’s board. Oh well. Subliminal messages and all.)