If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

For the last few weeks I’ve been intrigued by an ad campaign of which this is the most inexplicable execution:

The copy reads:

‘Although this ad originally ran in the 60s, it’s still considered to be one of the world’s most successful newspaper advertisements.’

‘This ad’ is of course a bastardised version of the VW ‘Lemon’ ad that ran in America in 1959. However, this reference might just go over (or around) the heads of the readers of the publication in which it appeared: The Sun. Now, as a self-confessed Sun reader of over 20 years standing, I wouldn’t say that my fellow readers are a bunch of ignorant, knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers, but to expect them to be aware of a foreign newspaper ad from 50 years ago is optimistic in the extreme.

Beyond that, quite why they’d give a shit about this ad campaign completely baffles me. You’d have to be someone who worked in advertising or marketing both to understand the reference and then to care enough about the ad to change your media schedule (and have a media schedule to change). I think this ad is aimed at maybe 1000 people, tops, many of whom will not be Sun Readers. And this is from an organisation that wants to tell me how to improve my ad spend. What next? A suggestion to run that commercial for the local curry house in the centre break of Corrie?

And it makes no sense. It actually says that the Lemon ad is 50 years old, which basically means that there have been very few newspaper ads since then that better illustrate the wonderful magic of newspaper advertising. That means the intervening 20000 days have been somewhat disappointing, but do read on.

‘It was one of many famous print ads that helped VW build their brand.
‘And VW still use newspaper advertising today to effectively support their brand strategy, proving that newspapers are still the most reliable of vehicles.

OK, I don’t want to be pedantic (actually, I do; it’s what I live for) but the fact that VW still advertises in newspapers doesn’t prove anything, other than the fact that VW still advertises in newspapers. Leaving the tortuous pun, split infinitive and use of the phrase ‘brand strategy’ in The Sun aside, this is really poor writing. The logic doesn’t flow and there is no justification for the conclusion they have simply made up.

‘But this medium doesn’t just build brands over the long term. Independent research shows that newspaper advertising makes an immediate sales impact and delivers lasting sales uplift. Particularly when used in conjunction with TV.’

Call me sceptical, but isn’t that like saying that a pop-gun causes a lot of damage, particularly when used in conjunction with a nuclear warhead? (And, by the way, that sentence should have a comma between ‘uplift’ and ‘particularly’, not a full stop.)

‘In fact this combination way outperforms other media combinations’

‘Way outperforms’? Jesus Christ. What about ‘substantially outperforms’? And it’s another fact-free conclusion that’s as weak as a paraplegic gnat. I imagine national newspaper and TV advertising does ‘way outperform’ other media combinations, for example: facial tattooing and the classified section of The Morning Star, or prostitute cards and six-sheets in John O’Groats. However, if you want us to be impressed you’ll have to specify what those combinations are.

‘So, like the lovable Beetle, newspaper advertising is your simple, hard-working, utilitarian medium.’

Should we add ‘unspectacular’, ‘outdated’ and ‘used by sentimental people who prefer it in the face of far more efficient alternatives’?

‘And with 37 million weekly readers spending an average of 40 minutes per paper, when it comes to selling your brand, newspapers are a peach. Not a lemon. www.nmauk.co.uk/iconicads’

Again, I think a comma would be better than a full stop between ‘peach’ and ‘not’, but who cares? There can’t possibly be anyone who’s still reading at this point (except me), so that beautiful fruit-based play on words is unfortunately going to go to waste. Never mind. Save it for the novel.

‘Newspaper Marketing Agency. Newspapers Deliver.’

If that’s the case, I’m absolutely delighted. However, the above seems to demonstrate that newspapers can also be an inappropriate medium that shoots itself in the foot. I assume that some plan was concocted whereby newspapers would promote themselves with free space given to this campaign (other ads reference Honda ‘Banana’, Haagen Dazs ‘Lose Control’, and Heinz ‘Tomato Slices’) but don’t they realise how dumb this looks? The entire conceit of using ‘famous’ ads of yesteryear seems to be a desperate lunge that says ‘there used to be a point to newspaper advertising but there isn’t anymore, otherwise we’d have dozens of successful ads from the last year to refer to. As it is, we’re losing massive share to online so we’ve written (very badly) these fact-free slices of misguided rubbish in the hope that they’ll convince one in a thousand of you to care. Fingers crossed.’

If they’d like a humble alternative suggestion, they might do better to build a persuasive case for newspaper advertising and take every single one of their target market for a nice lunch where they can gently and charmingly get their point across in a way that won’t be ignored.

Or they can take out some DPSs in the Daily Sport that just say ‘newspaper ads are great (honest)’ in 72pt futura bold condensed.

The main reason I can’t stand this stream of unadulterated turdage is that it so bone-headedly demonstrates an ad construction that I thought had died at the turn of the Millennium, namely: ‘But Not Like You Thought’.

It goes like this: you mention something crap, then counterpoint it by showing a visual of something ‘good/cool’ that can be referred to in the same way as the crap thing, thereby confounding our expectations. The main point of these ads is to make you think differently about something you supposedly thought was shit.

Although the classic is the Bacardi cinema ad from the 80s (VO: ‘The Dog and Duck, dahn the ‘igh street.’ Visual: four white-suited blokes running off down a jetty to a Caribbean bar) I recall a particularly bad BNLYT ad for Rover cars at the end of the nineties that was supposed to reposition the car. I can’t remember all the examples but one that stuck in the mind was the voiceover of ‘Pearly Queens’ (they were examples of old-fashioned GB) that was illustrated by two hot chicks with pearls in their pierced navels. See? It’s Pearly Queens, But Not Like You Thought.

Back to California: so the conceit is shit, but what about the examples? This is where it really falls down, because no one thinks California is a state of dull workaholics. The ‘board meetings’ are on skateboards and surfboards and the ‘pencil pusher’ is filling in his golf scorecard, but that doesn’t confound our expectations; it just makes us wonder why California feels the need to tell us their version of ‘playing catch up’ is on a bike ride. It’s California – of course it’s all sports and spas. Who thinks anything else? If I was being charitable, I could say that they’re trying to compare a holiday in California to the viewer’s dull work life, but that still doesn’t work, because any holiday, even one in Skegness, ought to be better than your average day.

Then (keep in mind it’s California, the land of the eye-wateringly famous), here are the people involved:

Actress Vanessa Marcil (who?)
Unknown surfer
Unknown snowboarder
Professional skateboarder Paul Rodriguez Jr. (who?)
Professional cyclist Levi Leipheimer (who?)
Golfer Phil Mickelson (just about heard of him)
Actress Vanessa Williams (from Ugly Betty; used to be Miss America)
Unknown family
Musician Chris Isaak (but I didn’t recognise him)
Unknown spa lady
Actor Andrew Firestone (WHO!??!!)
Actor Rob Lowe (a Proper Star! Although not really at his peak)
CA first lady Maria Shriver
CA governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (another star)

Oh dear.

This is what the home of movie-making came up with for their bestest, show-offest, this-is-how-great-we-really-are movie.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

PS: apologies for three posts in a row slating ads that I can’t quite bring myself to like very much. I’m in a perfectly jovial mood, but sometimes a bunch of stinkers turn up at once, kind of like like crappy Michael Caine movies in the late eighties. I’ve got another lined up for tomorrow, by the way. xxx

Here’s what’s odd about this campaign:

1. It’s a campaign. The other executions are identical but for the different scrunched-up noses they feature. I wonder why they did that. Was it because elderly white women would identify with this one, but if they saw the one with the black man’s nose they’d be totally confused and would not know how to perceive the scent of something by means of the olfactory nerves?

2. The use of a picture at all. I assume most of you know that shoots are a bit of an undertaking: cast the right people, light them right, get them to scrunch their noses up right, choose from the alternatives, show them to the CD and client, change all of the above based on the client’s opinion, mac the ad up etc etc… And all because we might not understand what you mean by smell gas? Hmmm…now how do I smell gas? Ah! With my nose! Of course!

3. The bumph is virtually illegible. Why white writing on a whitish background?

4. You only need that emergency number when you’re at home or work: the very places that 48-sheet posters do not exist. Of course, you could write the number down on the off-chance you’re going to smell gas later, but I somehow doubt many people are going to do this.

Why not ‘SMELL GAS?’ and the phone number, maybe with a National Grid logo at the bottom just so you know it’s not a prank. Or perhaps a leaflet through the door that features a pull-off magnetised number so you can stick it on the fridge? Would that have been so hard?

Apparently.

Here’s the government’s new, 90 second anti-obesity ad.

It’s part of a £275m campaign to stop the nation’s kids turning into a bunch of lardy bastards.

“Change4Life has a critical ambition. We are trying to create a lifestyle revolution on a huge scale, something which no government has attempted before,” said public health minister Dawn Primarolo.

“We have adopted ideas from successful movements such as Make Poverty History and Comic Relief. We want families to engage with the campaign and understand that obesity is not someone else’s problem.”

Problem (with the ad at least): it doesn’t seem to be telling anyone anything new in a compelling way.

It seems to me that they’ve decided to adopt the tone of a 3-year-old’s TV show to impart some crushing yet obvious information: ” …which meant they’d be more likely to get horrid things like heart disease, diabetes and cancer…their lives might be cut short. And that’s terrible, because we love the little blighters.”

Indeed, cancer is a pretty ‘horrid thing’. And thanks for explaining why the premature death of our children might be a bad thing: because we love them.

The country isn’t really this thick, is it? Do we really have to tell people that cancer’s bad and we love our kids? And if not, surely this isn’t the best way to persuade people the change their behaviour.

On top of that, we can add the fact that the government thinks this is the best way to spend £275m of our money.

As an ex-porker (I weighed 15 stone when I was 15), I’d like to make a small alternative suggestion that might at least persuade the teenage section of the target market to drop a few pounds: point out the effect that being fat has on your chances with the opposite (or same) sex. That thought alone got me to drop 5 1/2 stone in 6 months.

I’m sure it’s un-PC to point out that most people find fatties physically unpleasant, but it’s true, it’s motivating and it could make for some thought-provoking ads.

I’m envisaging a 96-sheet of a dribbly pair of pasty man-boobs with the line: ‘If your tits are bigger than hers, you’ve got no chance’.

Something like that, anyway.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I set last week’s poll, but it certainly wasn’t such an overwhelming antipathy towards the 20th letter of the alphabet.

More than half of voters decided that they would rather do without T than the other choices: E, S and A.

Enlightening? Hmmm…

Well, a new poll starts today, so if you wouldn’t mind contributing, I think we can bring elucidation to another dark corner of the universe.

Every year William Hill elbows its way onto page three of The Sun with its annual list of strange bets. For example, it might give odds of 500-1 on Alex Ferguson marrying Cheryl Cole, or 30-1 on Florence and the Machine winning the Eurovision Song Contest.

Well, this year they’ve extended its remit to the world of advertising*:

Evens: Hiring freeze at all agencies not currently in the midst of a hiring freeze.
3-1 Hovis best ad at BTAAs.
2-1: People whinge about Hovis getting best ad at BTAAs.
8-1 New Cadbury’s ad feted as saviour of industry despite trying to portray an evening on Amyl Nitrate as a ‘glass and a half of joy’.
10-1 Creatives marginalised to the point of being asked to clean the agency loos with their tongues.
11-10: uses of the phrase ‘client mandate’ to top 100000 by February.
6-1 ‘Dear Jeremy’ letters are exclusively about avoiding home repossessions.
50-1: New Carling execution features one of the happy-go-lucky chaps going down for sexual assault of a minor. His mates’ decision to stick with him rings somewhat hollow this time.
20-1: ‘Left by mutual consent without a job to go to’ becomes the most popular euphemism for ‘sacked’.
80-1: UK finally produces groundbreaking piece of digital advertising.
3-1: YouTube is the point of origin for the best ad of the year.
150-1: Skoda and Fallon misjudge the mood of the nation by making a car out of aborted foetuses as an allegory for all the substandard models that didn’t happen.
75-1: Credit Crunch leads several agency arse-lickers to try to steer Noel Bussey towards the set lunch menu.
150-1: Noel takes the hint.
8-1: The general lack of cash is mentioned all the bloody time but the actual situation ends up not being anywhere near as bad as anyone expected, but then China starts WW3 over the number of used nappies we’ve been accidentally sending them for recycling and we all end the year hiding from a nuclear winter down the Bakerloo Line.

*Not true.

Whopper Freakout was one of the best ads/multimedia whatchacallits this year. Here’s the version with swearing and references to being a junkie:

Now and again the advertising ‘community’ wrings its hands over the paucity of racial minorities that work within it. Then we go back to our lattes and wring our hands over the lack of women or homosexuals or, more likely, most of us couldn’t care less.

I posted about this on the ‘other’ blog about a year ago and DHM’s blog has mentioned it recently, but I think I might have found a subconscious reason why:

There aren’t many racial minorities in our ads, at least not in the good ads that might make you want to get into advertising. Chack out the UK nominees at D&AD this year:

Skoda Cake? Zero. Here Come The Girls? Two quick shots in 100 seconds. Carling Space/Out has a black guy but he’s not given a line in 60 seconds of Space (in fact you can barely tell he’s black) but he’s upgraded to a line in Out. Time Theft? Zero. Dangerous Liaisons? Zero. In Orange ‘belonging’ the star has about 50 friends, one of whom (barely featured) is black. Brylcreem Effortless? None.

Interestingly, the main character in the best ad of last year is black, but then Americans seem to have either a much more enlightened attitude to featuring racial minorities or a legal paranoia about positive discrimination. I remember a few years back where every ‘youth’ ad in the US had to have a young black guy who was often the cool counterpoint to a white idiot. Hey! Reverse racism! (Or something)

I’m not for a second suggesting that this is all about racism, but there may be some reasons for this that come from somewhere other than a desire to burn crosses on lawns:

1. Pan-Euro ads. Aside from the fact that most of Europe is caucasian, the vast majority of the spenders in Europe are definitely so. Add to that the very real racism of countries like Italy and Spain and you have territories where the inclusion of racial minorities is very unlikely to happen. And now that more and more of the UK’s ads are for other markets, this is only going to increase.

2. The Scandinavian influence (I say Scandinavian because they have made the biggest impact on UK advertising over the last ten years, but the same could be said of other nations). There aren’t as many racial minorities in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, so for those directors and creatives, it’s unlikely that the the first person they think of casting for a commercial will be a racial minority, and the absence of such may not even occur to them.

3. A few years ago I went to see Miuccia Prada give a talk. One of the audience asked her why she didn’t feature black girls in her catwalk shows. She replied that her shows represented her visions and dreams, and if those didn’t feature black people then nor would the shows. She didn’t think it was her responsibility to dishonestly represent her ‘art’ to tokenly include racial minorities. I guess there may also be an element of that in advertising. Should we have a black person in an ad just because there are a lot in the country?

4. Racism. I worked on a telecoms account (not BT) a while back and we suggested having a black guy as one of the characters in our animated commercial. I can’t remember why we wanted to do that, but it was probably to differentiate his vignette from the several others we featured. Anyway, we didn’t see it as a problem. We then got an email back from the client that said we were being ‘controversial enough’ by using animation and that we didn’t want to ‘fan any flames’ by featuring a black character. It was written with the kind of illiteracy one might expect from an unhinged BNP member and left us, in the year 2000, quite shocked, particularly as the account guy was a racial minority.

There are some interesting exceptions: Halifax has given us black, asian and fat as a house, as if they’re trying to cast anyone but a good-looking white guy, and of course, many of Nike and Adidas’s finest spots have featured black people, but it’s not many. Check out the Hovis ad: one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it view of a black guy from behind followed by a quick shot of an asian couple.

Is this the reason few black people want to get into advertising? Maybe. Or is it the case, as I mentioned on the DHM post, that black people don’t actually like the overall image of advertising as an industry and don’t find the idea of joining a hotbed of white, middle class smugness very appealing?

Thanks to L for this festive clip:

and here’s my favourite Christmas song:

I may post over the next two weeks, but I hope to be too drunk to work a keyboard.

Happy Christmas.

xxx