Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans » Advertizing

When adverts get moralistic

Jules Evans — Thu, 31 May 2012 11:25:54 +0000

Nothing worse than when adverts try to get spiritual, shortly before stuffing their product in your face. This advert for Hiscox insurance really goes for the holier-than-thou tone – the voiceover (by Benedict Cumberbatch) tells us the world is ‘somehow broken…institutions have let us down…a person’s word has lost its worth…but we still admire honesty, fairness, honour…At Hiscox, we give our word we will be there when you need us’. It practically got booed when it was shown at the cinema last night. Do they think we’re idiots?

This is why I hate some adverts. We are so saturated in them, all of them trying to be sincere, trying to be authentic, trying to connect with us, trying to read our feelings and values and reflect them back to us. All of them fumbling for our emotional ‘hot buttons’. And all of them, naturally, trying to sell something, trying to manipulate us into feeling and spending.

Eventually, when we feel really sick of the whole over-commercialised environment, the advertisers try to tap into that feeling too, and use it to sell us yet more products.

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PRADA: luxury as therapy / therapy as luxury

Jules Evans — Tue, 22 May 2012 10:29:35 +0000

Check out this new advert for PRADA, made by Roman Polanski, starring Ben Kingsley and Helena Bonham-Carter. The implication is the therapist, once intended to free their patients from false illusions like consumerism, becomes himself seduced by the luxury experience. Because it isn’t an illusion – glamour is real (such is the message anyway).

It also fetishises the experience of therapy – the wealthy attractive heiress kicking off her PRADA shoes to recline seductively on the therapeutic couch, to indulge the luxury of talking about herself and her inner world (even if the therapist is actually far more interested in her outer accoutrements than her inner world). Luxury as therapy / therapy as luxury. How deliciously bourgeois.

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Adspeak: The ‘Lynx epidemic’

Jules Evans — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 00:50:00 +0000

The Centre for the History of the Emotions’ Mark Honigsbaum, who studies the social and emotional experience of epidemics, might find this somewhat trashy advert for Lynx interesting (then again, he may not). You can see how the admen are trying to tie their product in to the cinematic language of plague / zombie films. Now I’m no Don Draper, but why do you want a deodorant ad to summon up associations with zombies and plagues? Also, why would you want to wear a deodorant that apparently drives zoo animals into a frenzy? And is the European politician who appears at the end, the one who can’t stop himself jumping onto a female reporter, meant to be Dominique Strauss-Kahn? Perhaps his lawyer could use it as a defence: ‘It wasn’t his fault, m’lud…it was the Lynx effect.’ I particularly like the last line of the advert: ‘Do not buy Lynx Attract’. OK – I won’t!

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Adspeak: British Airways

Jules Evans — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:57:00 +0000

How do you sell things in times of uncertainty and crisis? One way is to appeal to consumers’ sense of nostalgia, and the sense of a golden past when everything was more certain, safe, warm and good. This 2009 article from the New York Times explored the phenomenon:

As the recession continues taking its toll, marketers are trying to tap into fond memories to help sell what few products shoppers are still buying. The time-machine tactics are primarily evoking four decades — the 1950s through the 1980s. For instance, on April 20 a beverage unit of PepsiCo will begin an eight-week campaign for “throwback” versions of two soft drinks, Pepsi-Cola and Mountain Dew. The packages and formulas, along with advertising and promotions, will evoke the ’60s and ’70s. The hope is that warm, fuzzy feelings about the past will help make people feel better about the present and future. “It’s about yearning for the past, a simpler time, even though the ’60s and ’70s were not simple,” said Frank Cooper, chief marketing officer for sparkling beverages at the Pepsi-Cola North America Beverages unit of PepsiCo. “They just seem simple, looking back,” he added.

A great (if not very believable) example of this sort of nostalgia advertizing is the new British Airways advert. Airplane companies are in a real bind at the moment – they’re being crippled by high fuel prices, their profit margins are under attack from budget airlines, and people no longer feel so good about flying. Spoilt consumers that we are, we no longer feel it’s a wonderful luxury to fly, something you dress up for, like going to the opera. Instead it’s a hassle: you have to go through long security checks at over-crowded airports, then squeeze into crammed airplanes run by surly staff, then sit next to an Arab with a ticking turban for eight hours…and all the while you’re guiltily aware that it’s terrible for the environment.

So what do airlines do? They appeal to a better past, back when it was considered glamorous or even noble to fly. Virgin Airlines, for example, looked back to the 1980s or to the Bond movie pastiche of the 1960s, while British Airways recently got even more grandiose, and tried to make a connection between the heroic first test pilots of the early 20th century and their own spoilt, strike-prone staff.

It’s a ridiculous advert by BA really – the heroic, moustachioed aviator chap ‘leaving wives and children in their snug homes with just a kiss and a promise to come home’ (except we see the wife and child waiting dutifully by the runway). BA gropes for an aura of moral mission, fumblingly attempts to give the viewer and consumer a warm sense of moral uplift, but what they really do (and this is true of pretty much every advert on TV) is coarsen our sense of the moral and meaningful. Those moral buttons have been pushed so many times by every clumsy marketeer that we have become numb, and have stopped believing in any moral message.

I can’t stand adverts that make out their companies have some over-arching Big Society-esque moral mission that connects the entire country in one big family. So many ads try to do this at the moment – the product as national ideology, connecting friends, families, neighbourhoods. You know the kind of ad – people spilling out from their homes and marching euphorically down the street in great outpourings of civic togetherness…except it’s all for a product…like paint-stripper or something. And when did you last see your neighbours spilling out into the street to celebrate paint-stripper?

Like this new Halifax advert, which shows the bank’s staff singing along together like they’re in some goddam Methodist choir. Seriously, companies, stop pretending to be social enterprises. By the way, Halifax, the slogan ‘The bank that likes to give back’ kind of sticks in the throat when taxpayers gave you and our other high street banks £850bn in bail-out money. How about you give that back?

Just to show I’m not completely curmudgeonly (although I am), I prefer these two Virgin Atlantic ads – they don’t try and get in a pulpit and preach to us, but instead appeal to our sense of fun and sex. Those parts of our brain never seem to get numbed, however often companies push them.

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Adspeak: Stella Artois 4%

Jules Evans — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:02:00 +0000

Here’s another socially aspirational advert for an alcoholic drink. This time it’s Stella Artois 4%. At the train station, a young worker sees a fashionable bourgeois girl get onto a train. She makes eye contact – but what can a rough young worker hope from such a social mismatch. Yet our worker gives chase, and gets on the train – in third class, of course, among the pigs and peasants. He bravely presses on to second class, only to meet the class barrier of the ticket inspector. And yet, somehow, as he goes past the ticket inspector, he magically assumes his clothes and social position. Then, as he enters the exalted realm of the first class train buffet, another magic switch-around transforms him into the waiter. Finally, the last magic switch-around transforms him into an affluent businessman, just in time to smile at the posh young girl – finally as a social equal, worthy of her attention. It is like Great Expectations in 60 seconds – our hero goes from peasant to playboy in under a minute, all thanks to the socially transforming fairy-dust of Stella.

The advert is for Stella Artois 4% – triple filtre. The implication is that, just as the beer has been triple filtered to remove all impurities, so, if you drink it, it will filter you of all your class and social impurities, and magically aid your ascent up the social ladder. Cheers!

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