‘This Isn’t Just Crap… This Is Total And Utter Crap!’
Every so often an advertising campaign will come along which has a truly haunting quality about it. But when I say ‘haunting’, I do not mean in the poetic or romantic sense of the word. No, I am thinking more along the lines of a terrifyingly bad, chains-clanking-in-the-night, too-scared-to-sleep kind of ‘haunting’. That is the category in which I’d put the recent spate of Marks and Spencers food adverts. They are cheapness and nastiness dressed-up as poshness. And they borrow their ideas from the oldest trade in the world.
Marks and Sparks (or ‘M & S’ now that it has been sexed-up for the twenty-first century) have never run an advertising campaign quite as nauseating as this one. ‘This isn’t just food… this is M & S food’ croons the husky-voiced bird narrating it. ‘For God’s sake,’ I find myself screaming at the TV, ‘I want to eat it, not make lurve to it!’
And, if the overtly sexual female voice is not enough to arouse you, then there are plenty of explicit close-ups of chocolate pud, treacle tart and anything else with a vaguely sensual element about it. Talk about ‘tickle your taste buds’… Cor! I think the whole campaign was probably handled by some disillusioned and out of work soft porn director.
Just what ‘M & S’ were hoping to achieve with it all is totally beyond me. Perhaps their head of advertising has had some kind of mid-life crisis. He has suddenly become convinced that all of their customers want nothing more than to slip into bed with a Marks and Spencer Spotted Dick (‘smothered in lashings of thick, heavenly custard’).
Seriously though; sex sells. This is a sad fact of advertising, but it is still very true. And if you ever had any doubts about it being true, then this campaign is living and (heavy) breathing proof.
Now if you want to look at a good and straight forward marketing campaign, one of my fave companies has recently put live this blog to educate the public on what they are doing. It is really worth a look if you have a moment.