Too sad for ads
Trains are too miserable for job ads now, says The Villain
God knows I’ve been in many miserable places in my time. Condemned factories. Corruption-driven offices. Basingstoke. You name it – if it’s depressing, stultifying or distressing, I’ve been there, dutifully plying my modest HR skills.
But in recent years, I genuinely can’t think of anything more miserable than my daily commute on the train into London.
Of course, trains have always been a bit on the dispiriting side. Ever since BR was invented, people have made gags about its inedible pork pies, its truculent porters and the hilarious unreliability of its service.
Add to this recent ‘innovations’ such as serial overcrowding, the constant blare of ill-fitting earphones and Pendolino toilets, and you’ve got an atmosphere so unremittingly bleak it’s a wonder they don’t actually dole out Prozac with the tickets.
But in the last couple of years, one feature of train travel has made it much, much worse than it’s ever been before.
Yes, the charity advertising. You can’t walk onto a carriage right now without seeing multiple images of famine, catastrophe, pain or social injustice. I’ve been on carriages recently where there have been around a dozen different ads all of which have been specifically designed to make me feel ill at ease.
If you’re a train commuter, tell me which of these you haven’t seen ads for in the last few months: old people suffering from loneliness; children made homeless by war; children/dogs/donkeys with no-one to care for them at Christmas; youths forced into prostitution; youths killed by cold when sleeping on the streets; dogs made homeless by way; malaria; female genital mutilation; under-supported ex- servicemen; dogs without gardens.
All good causes, I’m sure. (Well, some of them.) But I don’t want to think about them in that sensitive, personal time between eating my Weetabix and staggering into the workplace.
It’s like all the other media channels got together one day and said, ‘Heck, this charity stuff’s a real downer for our audiences. Why not corral it all onto second-class public transport, where it won’t be seen by the people who really matter?’
The shame for HR is (and admittedly, this was a long time coming in this article) that all this misery effectively deprives us of a good environment to place our recruitment adverts.
It used to be that trains were packed full of boisterous rec ads. ‘Why bother commuting into the city,’ many of them would chirrup, ‘when you could have a perfectly good job closer to home?’
Others were surgically pinpointed by media planners to attract employees of certain offices served by that train line or bus route.
Sneaky, but often extremely effective, too.
But you wouldn’t do that now. The medium is the message, said Marshall McLuhan, which means that any rec ad on a train carriage becomes instantly tainted by all the surrounding propaganda about death and desolation.
In terms of the health of your employer brand, you’d be far better off sticking your ad in a hearse or an STD clinic than on the 6.53 to Cannon Street.
Still, there may be some optimism on the horizon. A colleague tells me that train companies are cutting down on the percentage of charity advertising they carry. This probably has more to do with increasing revenue than increasing the sum of commuter happiness.
But never mind. If it means we get a few more live vacancies on trains between the photos of the dead donkeys, good luck to ‘em.
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