Читать книгу The World and London According to Nick Ferrari - Nick Ferrari - Страница 10

The advertising industry has to be up there with prostitution as the most morally repugnant business there is – although it is true that the money is slightly better if you go into the selling of soap powder, dog biscuits or cat chews as opposed to your body.

I was shopping in a supermarket the other day, and I couldn’t believe one particular advertising slogan which read as follows: ‘Love Your Bum’. This was for a particular brand of toilet tissue, and it got me wondering about the process whereby they brainstormed that particular slogan.

Picture the scene: a long boardroom and a series of pony-tailed executives in dark suits and polo neck sweaters, all sitting round the glass-topped table drinking double decaf lattés and mineral water and sucking on Fox’s Glacier Mints. Their brief? How to make a particular brand of toilet tissue more attractive to shoppers, and so sell more, and so make more profits for the shareholders, and so make everybody think this particular advertising agency is a bunch of geniuses. A series of lunches would then result in various slide presentations, flipcharts, coloured diagrams, coloured graphs and goodness knows what else. The creative juices of these supposedly fine minds are allowed to run free until we are eventually left with a slogan of unparalleled ‘brilliance’ – a heartfelt request to love your bottom.

I have to tell you – even though you may not want to know – that in my life various people have been strangely attracted to various parts of my anatomy, but I think I am on fairly safe ground when I state quite definitively that no one has been ever been particularly enamoured by my backside. The idea that I will suddenly swoop on a packet of toilet tissue simply because I have been told that to do so will allow me to love my bum just leaves me speechless.

But it doesn’t end there. Recently, a major bank started an advertising campaign based on the strapline: ‘We love to rock and roll’. How much more ludicrous could that possibly be? If I deposit my money with a bank, I want to know that it’s secure. I want to know that skilful executives are trying to make as much interest from it as possible, that they are making scrupulously wise investments, that they are there twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, guiding me what to do with it. I want them to be dull. I want them to be boring. I want them to be sensible. I am not in the least bit excited by the prospect of them standing on their desks with their ties around their heads dancing to the latest sounds while naked ladies walk around carrying silver platters of cocaine for their enjoyment. I don’t want my bank to rock and roll. I don’t want to go in to meet my area manager to be told, ‘I’m afraid he’s a bit busy at the moment checking out the new Chaka Demus cut, and then he’s going partying with Lemmy from Motörhead, Jordan and a couple of chicks from S Club 7.’

It is plainly ridiculous. And banks are not the only guilty parties. What about the whole series of adverts on television that show that bloke reaching an almost climactic level of glee because he’s managed to get the bathroom clean for his girlfriend by using a particular cleaning product. Does that correspond to anything anybody recognises in real life? Most men think they’re being almost neurotically hygienic if they remember to lift the loo seat. Or, at the other end of the scale, what about the young women who, as soon as that time of the month comes around, decide it’s time to start driving around cross country in an open-top Jeep, attend aerobics classes in an impossibly skin-tight leotard and participate vigorously in volleyball matches before dancing the night away with a series of different hunky men at a beachside bar? Am I the only one that thinks it’s far more likely that they’d be slobbing out on the sofa in a pair of comfortable, but unflattering, tracksuit bottoms, eating a family-sized bar of Dairy Milk and watching endless reruns of Sex and the City with a hot-water bottle clasped to their stomach?

No, I have become firmly convinced that advertising exists for one reason and for one reason only: to keep people in employment who wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting a job in anything else. Years ago, when I was working for the Fox Television station in New York, myself and a number of other executives were gathered around a table trying to sort out a series of adverts that were going to run in the New York newspapers. The advert was getting more and more complex as we tried to get smarter and smarter with our different lines, suggestions, use of pictures and just about everything else. We all thought we were being so brilliantly clever with our piquant double entendres and were convinced that our clever devices showed how terribly witty and ironic we were. However, the advert itself was getting further and further away from the point until the most senior of the executives suddenly slammed the table with the palm of his fists, opened the New York Post and showed us all an advert for McDonald’s. It read: ‘Burger, fries and a drink – $1.99’.

‘That,’ he said, ‘is true advertising. It’s simple, and everyone gets the message.’ And the more you study the sort of ads we see today, the more you realise this is true. Think of almost any advertisement you’ve recently seen on television, heard on the radio or seen in the papers and you will notice they are becoming increasingly complex. Indeed, at times they seem to have absolutely no relevance to the subject whatsoever. Remember the one for a tyre company with a giant fat Buddha of a man standing in the middle of the road with his head covered in spikes wearing bondage gear while thunder and lightening broke around him and the sky was full of massive ball bearings. Why the hell does that mean I have to go and buy a particular brand of tyre? In fact, I honestly can’t remember which brand it was advertising.

It’s always interesting when I have conversations on the radio about the power of advertising. I enjoy giving callers a certain catchphrase or slogan from a brand – eight times out of ten a listener will have trouble remembering what it’s actually for. You can try and play now if you like. Who or what was a Humphrey? What were those famous squeaky-voiced tin Martians actually advertising? The impeccably cool actor Rutger Hauer advertised a particular drink, but what was the brand? The amazing grinning dog lying by the fireside won a stack of awards – what was he, she or possibly it selling? And Orson Welles was famous for appearing in a series of TV adverts in Britain, but again, what was he hawking? No problems if you fail to answer any of these questions. If you’ve struggled to remember just what all these products are, as I’m sure many of you have, you start to see why the sums of money some companies spend on their advertisements is close to lunacy.

I’ve been involved on both sides of the fence. I’ve both commissioned advertising campaigns and I have featured in them. Very recently, for the radio station LBC, they shot a series of advertisements with me in different guises and poses: one of them was me pretending to ride a canoe down the London underground and the other was me standing at the top of a police motorbike display team. Now here’s a question for you: what do either of those two situations have to do with a radio programme in London? If you’re as baffled as me – and clearly most of the viewers of the advertisement were – I’m afraid I can’t help. But the experience did give me an interesting insight into the world of advertising and what the people were like. I get shivers down my spine even now when I recall an entire Thursday afternoon spent in a film studio in West London sitting in a small canoe that was actually balanced between two tables, reciting lines like, ‘Well, it beats other ways to get around!’ If they filmed me once, they must have filmed me fifty times, and before each take girls would arrive with make-up, hair, refreshments and just about everything else to try and keep me happy. When the director decided that the canoe needed a bit more animation, two men were employed to start rocking it gently, one at either end. Trying to deliver that line without roaring with laughter was very tricky indeed.

The other advert I made was the one that entailed me riding on the shoulders of two mounted police officers as if I was on the top of a pyramid as part of their motorcycle display team. As we rolled past the camera I had to deliver the line, ‘Well, you all say you want more police on the streets!’ Unfortunately, I was staring straight into the sun, the two lads on whom I had to perch had not been warned of my considerable girth and bulk, and the driver of the truck was slightly deaf so he always managed to drive past the camera either a little too quick or little too slow. Not surprisingly, this advert went straight to satellite TV and never actually made it on to anything terrestrial – not even a break in the Tricia programme.

What did all this teach about me the advertising process? Simply that it’s all smoke and mirrors. Never casually believe words such as ‘natural’ or ‘enhanced’ – when you think about it, what do they actually mean? If you see a two for one offer in the supermarket, check out the price for the one – check it’s not hugely inflated. There is no such thing as a free lunch – not even on an expense account in Charlotte Street, the heart of the British advertising industry.