One down for VG

What you see on the picture is one of the worst bills I’ve lately seen. I tend to ignore those bills because they are just annoying, don’t have any meaning or value. They don’t even look pretty. This one made me angry. Upset. It confirmed again my (initially pretty cursory) opinion about VG.

You know see these bills everywhere. They’re not on the trams yet, but all other place I could think of for placing them: they there are.

This bill is mean to you. And that’s just one thing.

Let me explain: The sign says “Mom and Dad believe that I’m safe in the kindergarden. But it is true?” and “Check your Kindergarten at VG.no.” The graphics are childlike, just as a kid would have maybe drawn it.

This bill places an idea, a thought in your head, basically in the head of every parent: “If I don’t follow the advise on this board, my kid might be in danger and I don’t know about. At the place where I thought it would be safe.”

It places fear in your head. It concerns you and makes you frightened. You get frighted about something you don’t know. That’s a kind of paranoia it places in your head. And you start thinking where else there is danger. The unknown, unspecified danger. The unnamed one. The childish drawing makes it sound with a child’s voice in your head. It makes it more authentic and more real. And more frightening. We all want to protect our children, don’t we?

As soon as you get trapped in that circle the only way out is actually following the advise or accepting the hard truth, that there will always be danger of some unknown kind somewhere. Checking the website is much easier.

And I’d say that’s what this is about: Getting you on the website. The intention is quite usual and well seen in other commercials day by day. The basic message “Come on our site” just in a different language?

This ad is playing on the guilty feelings you have if you don’t take care about your children. It’s triggering the basic human instincts. For some clicks on a website. This is crossing a line in my eyes.

The intention might be to get “just” some more visitors on a website, but this trivial goal takes some reckless costs.

The indirect promise to be informed, to find protection against the threatening evil will not even be fulfilled afterwards. That’s simply something a newspaper can’t deliver.

And this is what creates that reaction for me. I’d like to simply rip all those boards down and burn them right away. I want to scream at them that this campaign has as much value as white bread has vitamins. Instead of really delivering some information, doing basically journalism, it’s plays into the categories Sex and Crime - some of the most selling stories. But with the benefit of personally affecting you. By scaring the shit out of you.

Maybe you’re one of those who hasn’t thought about this. Maybe you didn’t even notice. Maybe you’re just lucky and this doesn’t bother you at all. I envy you. A lot.