Skip to main content

How I found God on the tube

I glanced this morning at an ad on the London Underground promoting the 'award-winning' Christian Connection dating website.

The headline makes an astonishing claim, which must surely be causing consternation at the Advertising Standards Authority: 'God knew you would read this'.

Of course, we're aware that the Lord moves in mysterious ways. But the fact that this extends to precision targeting of commuters in ambient advertising campaigns still comes as something of a shock.

Let's take the message at face value for a moment. 

God clearly has you on his radar and knows that you're a good Christian, who is seeking a like-minded partner. He's decided, in His wisdom, to sponsor a particular dating site - perhaps because of its award-winning credentials.

But there's a problem. You don't know the site exists.

This leaves God with only one option: advertising. He can guide you to the posters by getting you to sit in particular carriages. But the posters have to be there in the first place. That must require a lot of meetings with agency planners and media buyers and suchlike. Lucky He has time on His hands in between the war in Syria and the provocative twerking of Miley Cyrus.

Far be it from me to challenge the Lord's modus operandi, but in his omnipotence, couldn't he just arrange for love-struck Christians to bump into each other at the top of an escalator?

It's similar to my general gripe with the spirit world. Why use a medium who garbles your messages, when you could opt for Snapchat or Twitter?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Captain Birdseye and other people of rank

Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...
3 comments
Read more

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.
1 comment
Read more

When one name isn't enough

You may have heard the news reports about the turmoil in Kingston, Jamaica, resulting from the government's attempts to pin down a notorious drug lord on behalf of the US. I was struck by the number of self-styled monikers this guy has given himself. He is, depending on the channel you listen to, known on the street as 'Dudas', 'The Big Man' and 'The President' - worshipped by many impoverished Kingston residents as a benefactor to slum dwellers. It's his real name that seems most appropriate, however. If you were a drug baron called Christopher Coke, wouldn't you leave it at that? It's certainly not a name to be sniffed at.
Post a Comment
Read more