Unhappy Accidents In Advertising
It wasn’t that many months ago, when the order from She who must be obeyed came through to re-tile a bathroom, so off to the decorating shop to see what she wanted.
On the way to the tile section, we passed through the wallpaper aisles: I still bear the scars. Some of the samples, I imagined, had clearly come from one of David Cronenberg’s more grisly cinematic offerings.
What was more disturbing yet was the chain of events that had led the wallpaper to being there in the first place. The shop owners must have thought the designs saleable. The distributor must have thought the same. The manufacturer must have thought them money-spinners, and most disturbing of all, someone must have designed them in the first place. And once one disturbing design hits the shelves, more surely follow, and that really is the point of this piece.
We of the Big Red Moose herd take more notice of advertising than most because it’s our job to. Let’s start with insurance. The very first Go Compare ad was two chaps discussing insurance over a cup of coffee at a café. At the end of the ad, our plump, Welsh singer strikes up with the familiar refrain, and when one of our chaps expresses his curiosity, the other says ‘he was cheap; he’s only a tenor’.
Compare the Meerkat was the original, fictional website owned by the talking creature expressing his consternation on being pestered by people asking him about insurance.
Both examples are derived from puns, and amusing as a result. This doesn’t explain why other vendors have jumped on the bandwagon, and the result is a marketplace dependent on getting their sales message across employing nothing other than nonsense to do so.
Now look at the toilet tissue market; for Pete’s sake, what are you going to use it for? The fragrance market, so active around Christmas time, doesn’t describe what the desired effect by wearing such fragrances could achieve; you’d have to wait until the 9 o’clock watershed if the advertiser were to be that honest, and whilst it’s difficult visually to describe a scent, there must be a compromise to some of the drivel on offer.
The problem is, that it would appear to work, as all the ads from each genre keep coming, and it doesn’t appear to deter the consumer. It would be interesting to see if more honest advertising has any appreciable effect: Ronseal, perhaps?