Does anyone here have any experience or knowledge on writing for television commercials?

Writing tv commercials? Surely they just steal ideas from other programmes and adapt them to market whatever product it is they are forcing down your throat.

If you're going to do commercials, you can't just submit a funny sketch idea. Adverts are multi-layered messages resulting from rigorous and continual audience research. They are (apparently) even more of an art form than sketches or other writing. Plus you have to sign over your soul. You have to be willing to present complete fallacy as truth, to con people into shelling out money they can't afford on products / tat that you tell them they need.

So many subliminal images, the constant arguments over careful sampling to define what precise words are needed to project corporate image and branding. It's even more of a snared pit than legit writing.

Professional campaigns are master classes in psychology. They rewrite history. For example: the VO5 ad re: the breakdown of the chinese cultural revolution, according to them, was based around two students' rebellious choice of hair styling product. The message? The way to rebel and bring about an end to autocracy is fashionable hair. They present false ideas in jokey tongue-in-cheek ways but the actual payload even when identified still manages to bypass your consciousness and implant itself. They flash carefully constructed images in front of us and have us baying like Pavlov's well-trained puppies at the first sight of bare flesh. They reinforce hidden images of death and sex in cigarette and booze ads. At first, you'd think that was counter-productive but the ad men found that raising anxiety over death actually forced the person to seek relief in (guess what?) fags and booze. Knowing this - I still fall victim to the industry, time and again.

As you can see I have little respect for the industry, and am very suspicious of an industry that claims its own product (advertising) does not work, yet if it doesn't work why do its clients pump billions of pounds into it.

After Orwell's 1984; everyone should read Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders - written in the 50s, yet it's scary to see how much psychology (brainwashing) was involved in it back then. So imagine what it's like in 2007.

Anyway, that's my paranoia offloaded for the week.

I considered taking some of sketches, which I kind of accidentally wrote which have scope to become a good advert... think I'll leave it now lol.

Don't sell your soul Paul!

Sorry for the tirade guys but corporate manipulation of social attitudes for financial gain ... yikes, sorry, I mean advertising ... is a real pet hate. It reduces me to shouting "Lies, bloody lies" at the screen so often that I have to turn the sound off during breaks.

Paul, don't let me put you off signing up with Sauron and his horde of corporate Orcs. But be aware that Frodo is on his way to Mount Doom. Me? I'm just Gollum.

*Poorly acting* But Slag you mean that Asda and Tesco are mega corporations trying to take every penny we own? Their adverts suggest they just want hugs from us!

I work for Tesco so I take it back...

Well its something I will consider anyway. I have no other real career going for me at the moment... stupid uni!

Every little helps...