The rougher the better

Unless you've been living in a cave without wifi for the last few months, you've probably seen and maybe even smirked at the proliferation of rough sketches, mostly rude, that succinctly send up aspects of our increasingly technological and politically correct society.

I suspect that these will, in the style of Family Guy, become more risque as time goes by and the appetites of their fans become whetted for ever more dangerous or obscure humour.

But it does strike me that this cartoon strip sketch genre, having featured in daily newspapers for so many years, has upped its game with the likes of Modern Toss and Cyanide and Happiness. They're, to my mind, a whole load funnier and more pointed than some of the strips you see in Metro or The Mirror, which seem drab even without comparison.

And the joy of the obscure, chillingly and scratchily explored by David Shrigley, is the perfect antidote to the annoyingly perfect corporate images we're used to seeing.

And websites such as www.b3ta.com continue to be brilliant in sending them all up.

And maybe that's just it: we like these quick, rough, insightful images precisely because it's not what we're used to seeing.

They hit on a truth, and with the minimum of effort succeed in conveying a thought.

In which case, we're really missing a trick in advertising. If the fundamental tactic we use is disruption, then we're not half as good as disrupting as we might like to think. We spend more time perfecting things so that they blend in with every other perfect image and feel far removed from stuff that really matters.

Why not be a bit rough? Why do they want to look all mendaciously sleek? Let's face it, most of them don't answer the phone or give good customer service, so in truth they're pretty damn flawed in any case.

When Joel Veitch was commissioned by Mastercard to produce the Switch/Maestro ads a few years back, I really hoped that they would usher in an era of less perfect ads. They were memorable precisely because they were a bit weird and unexpected.

Oh well.