Christmas is coming.
So too, it would appear, are the Olympics.
Either way, kerching!
We are two months away from Christmas as I write this. Travelling through an unremarkable English provincial town on the way to a client this week I noticed the local British Home Stores outlet plastered with Christmas themed marketing displays, the first of the year for me.
Cue the cliché – It seems to get earlier every year.
Tuned into the pre-Christmas theme at the office I noticed a couple of colleagues buying presents online during the day, already working through their Christmas lists. Hey, if the here-and-now doesn’t offer you much pleasure, why bother living in it?
It would seem some people rather enjoy this sort of thing.
I am not among them.
I don’t care for it, but then I can’t really be arsed about it either. For me I guess it’s like the Korean War, not officially over but a stable stand-off exists between me and the marketeers. We don’t much care for each other, we have our set limits, we have our boundaries, we have our compact.
But travelling through an unremarkable major English airport recently and perusing the advertising boards in the terminal building the compact seems to have been broken, a new front in the war has emerged. What the hell does the “Official Television of the 2012 Olympic Games” actually mean? How about the “Official Banking and Insurance partner of the 2012 Olympic games”? Or, God help us all, the “Official Legal Services provider of the 2012 Olympic games”? (Unless, one hopes, they are providing targets for the shooting events).
Suddenly I’m seeing it everywhere, shameless product placement, obscene opportunism, mindless bandwagonism. Little Olympic logos on every other television advert, the official this of the Olympic games, the official that, a marketing email from a hotel chain – the official mid-range hotel chain beginning with an H of the 2012 Olympics – punting an Olympic themed competition.
Too much? Too early? Too bloody right! And if it’s like this now, how much worse will it be six months before it all kicks off? Or three months? Or a few weeks, when perhaps some of this behaviour might start to look appropriate?
Time to get out of Dodge I think … where is that International jobs section…