A few weeks ago the people at Gillette must have felt themselves very special. They had long term contracts in place with three of the most popular, wholesome and clean cut sportsmen in the world, and every advert for the company was adorned by their faces.
Since then, Thierry Henry has become known worldwide not for his style, verve and footballing skills, but for his cheating handball exploits eliminating Ireland from the World Cup.
Then Tiger Woods, it appears, decided to have extra marital relations with more or less anyone who fancied a go with the world's number one golfer.
I guess the question is now what has Roger Federer done ? The clean cut and rather affable Swiss tennis player is the only one of the three not to have done something that would spoil his image.
Apparently the latest M&S Christmas ads are being complained about because they are sexist because Philip Glenister, very much in character as DCI Gene Hunt from Ashes to Ashes, says he wants as his Christmas present the girl from the ad who takes her clothes off.
Strange that those people who are complaining never moaned about women lusting after naked men in the Diet Coke ads from a few years back.
Two adverts strike me as being the most annoying on TV at the moment, but for very different reasons.
The first is NatWest advertising that they have "advisers in over 1000 branches who give free money saving advice". This is the same NatWest who are owned by RBS, who in turn are now 70% owned by the taxpayer because they were so shoddy at making investments in the first place. It's a bit like taking advice on childcare from the mother of Shannon Matthews !
The second advert that annoys me is the one urging people to become teachers. As a teacher I welcome anything that promotes the profession. However, they were reporting on the radio the other day that there had been a marked jump in applications for teaching courses and there seems to be little need for an advertising campaign when there are no shortages of applications. More than that, its a total waste of taxpayers money.
A rhetorical question of course given that people on Youtube also seem to find the advert very strange indeed.
The fact that someone at Coca Cola (who own Oasis) thought "Hang on, a girl having sex with a cactus ? That sounds great. Oh, and lets make the cactus hate water !"
I have spoken to other people about this advert and everyone else seems to find the whole Oasis Cactus kid stuff really very, very odd.
We are told that all publicity is good publicity. Personally I think this is absolute rubbish. If the chief executive of Super Dooper plc was suddenly charged with being a paedophile, it would create massive puclicity for Super Dooper plc, but little of it would be good publicity. The same goes with adverts. Some great, some awful, but people say if you remember them they are good adverts. but do they sell any products.
I like, as a piece of art, the new Cadbury's adverts featuring the Phil Collins song "In the air tonight" being drummed to by a Gorill (see YouTube clip below), but is it actually a great advert in the sense of selling chocolate ?
The first few times I saw the advert I failed to remember it was a Cadbury's advert and instead thought it was promoting Phil Collins greatest hits. I know people who still think this, so from the angle of promoting Cadbury's, is it effective ?
Then there is the second promotional angle. Cadburys sell chocolate. This is their job, their function, the purpose. Now I am a chocoholic, I can eat chocolate until it virtually makes me sick, and then I eat more. However, I can honestly say I have not bought a bar of chocolate in three months. If if this advert has had no effect on me, what is it like for others ? Has this adverts seen Cadburys sell more chocolate ?
So as great a piece of work as it is, as great a piece of art as it is, is it a good advert in terms of selling the product. No, I don't think it is. However, compared to most of the TV shows that ITV show around the adverts, this advert is probably the best thing on ITV at the moment.
I often wonder why it is that firms employ certain celebrities to endorse their products when I don't know a single person who actually likes the celebrity they have chosen. But in some cases, firms actually seem to hire people that negatively put people of the product all together.
Take, for example, Carol Vorderman. If there is a smugger woman on television then I have yet to see her. Only Gloria Hunniford can surely rival Carol Vorderman when it comes to inducing people to turn over. yet she gets advertising job after advertising job, with seemingly no awareness from the companies concerned that she simply puts people off.
First she was trying to flog us expensive loans by allowing us to consolidate our debts at a bank rate that I would consider very steep, and now she is working for Farm Foods, trying to flog us cheap iced cream and chips. The only problem is, as good a value as the products might be (even the expensive loans if you are unable to get a loan elsewhere), I really couldn't think of buying anything from Farm Foods because I find everything about Carol Vorderman absolutely repellent.
Have you ever been put off a product because of the person endorsing it ? Do let me know.
