The ad business doesn’t like to admit it – but it’s a fashion business.
The early years of British TV advertising was the era of animation or jingles or, preferably, both. At any gathering of middle-aged or older people even today, just sing a few notes of You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent or Murraymints – too good to hurry mints or The Esso sign means happy motoring or A Double Diamond works wonders or a host of others from the period. The chances are, that before you can launch into Rael Brook Toplin the shirt you don’t iron, you’ll have a sing-along on your hands.
Then came the age of the slogan. The likes of Drinka Pinta Milka Day, Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet, Heineken refreshes the parts, Beanz Meanz Heinz, Go to work on a egg, This is the age of the train, The Wonders of Woolies etc.
Then came a kind of reformation or culture revolution. A new breed of ad agencies found everything about these campaigns irredeemably naff. They started to create campaigns for which PhD in post-modern deconstructionism was required to discover exactly what was being advertised.
The American journalist and wit, H L Mencken, famously observed that nobody ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the public. Today Messrs Murdoch, Desmond and others are proving him right. The Sun and News of the World are extremely popular whilst the Times and Sunday Times are not. The Daily Star is the only UK daily to be growing significantly. Jilly Cooper outsells Salman Rushdie in spades. Millions more people watch Big Brother than Simon Schama on TV. More people like a story with a beginning, middle and an end, than the puzzling mind games so beloved of the critics.
The new wave of ad agencies in contrast, intellectualizes the business, turning Mencken’s dictum on its head. Their watchwords might as well be legal, decent, honest and obscure. The beautifully crafted works of art which sometimes masquerade as advertising risk going so far over the heads of their audiences that they could come to the attention of the President’s Star Wars shield.
February 2nd, 2010
