23/07/2002 - Entry #18
Update:
Whoa! Check this out! Ten of your English pounds will get you a meeting with Lisa Snowdon! Well...kinda. Apparently later on today (being Tuesday, the 23rd of July) there's some television pilot being filmed in London, wherein somebody gets kicked up the arse by one of the best looking girls in the entire known universe. I'm trying to work out exactly if it's a good or a bad thing. I mean, on the one hand, it's Lisa Snowdon! Lisa fucking Snowdon! Absolute perfection in a can. Surely any meeting with this Goddess among men is a good thing? It's gotta be your one and only chance to meet a real life angel. Unfortunately, that's also the downside, really. Your one and only chance to impress Lisa Snowdon, a woman whose beauty not only rivals but trounces that of Helen of legend, and she's going to be kicking you up the arse. I'm obviously not planning on doing it, because if nothing else I can't afford it. But I'm sitting here, trying to work out if it would be a good or a bad thing, and it's one of the hardest decisions I've ever had to make! Meeting this, versus getting kicked up the arse. I'm TORN! I'm so horribly TORN!
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Getting back to advertisements and commercials again for a minute...
Has anyone seen the new Radox shower gel advert? Oh my hat! Crux of the advert: Woman in desert, gets a bit hot, takes off all her clothes and has a shower.......Genius!! I'm not kidding, that's basically all that happens. I'm listening to music so I have no idea what the vocals are saying, but the visuals are supoib! I'm genuinely loving the way shower-gel adverts are getting more and more risque these days. It seems to be a competition to see who can show off the most female flesh without being banned. That's the kind of competition that puts the Olympics to shame. There's the one with the shower-room and the spider, which gets many bonus points for having so many naked girls in it. Then there's the one with the little rubber duck that comes to life, which gets many points for picking an absolute fox for the advert. Notice how I don't know which products were being advertised here, and how they've utterly failed to do their job because there's absolutely no resultant brand-recognition. And now Radox (first one I noticed! they're improving!) have upped the stakes and really launched themselves headlong into soft-core porn. I think they spent most of the production time going over the legalities of showing nipples and other sensitive areas in a television advertisement, working out precisely what they could get away with. Quick trip to Tunisia and Bob's your Uncle. It's a great advert. I can only hope it's going to usher in a new wave of full hardcore penetration in future shower-gel advertisements. Nothing's going to make me want to buy Radox shower-gel more than seeing some struggling but beautiful actress being anally excavated in a bath by three nuns with strap-on dildonic attachments.
Incidentally, that last sentence can be stopped just before the word "more" and still remains true.
It really makes me wonder who the hell they're trying to target with this stuff though. How many blokes buy Radox? Call me an advertising sheep, but I've always instinctively drifted towards male shower products like Lynx and Physio Sport. I'm sorry, but they're aimed at people my sex, and I'm comfortable with that. I don't know whether it's a feeling of social stigma, or some kind of innate belief that Lynx shower products have some magical ingredient specifically designed for men's skin, but I feel better buying that stuff than I would buying Fructis or Radox or something. Maybe other people don't have that stigma. I remember once in the trendy clothing stores I tend to shop at, I was looking through pairs of jeans, working out which I liked the look of. After a while the worky-dude came over to me and asked if I needed any help. I said I was fine, cheers, and he replied "Okay. Let me know if you want to look through the men's section, though". Ah. Cunning. Thanks for the speedy warning though. 'preciate it. Anyway, Lynx and the like are clearly aimed at men. They tend to have scantily clad women in them. Clearly aimed at men. Radox is bought by mostly women. Obviously, because the adverts have sc...antily....clad....hmmm.
This is one of the reasons I respect Bartle Bogle Hegarty so much. For anyone who doesn't know who they are, Bartle Bogle Hegarty are a London-based English advertising agency, and certainly one of the most respected in the whole world. They're repeatedly responsible for some of the best adverts of all time. They know exactly who to recruit to direct their adverts (usually they get MTV directors like Jonathan Glazer and Spike Jonze), who their clients should be, who they're targeting, everything. If I had to draw a comparison, I'd say that Bartle Bogle Hegarty are the The Designer's Republic. I've come to respect the Designer's Republic an awful lot in the last year or two, entirely down to Mal's influence. I like their approach to design, their integrity, and their direction. I feel the same way about Bartle Bogle Hegarty.
They started in 1982, if I remember correctly, and have since then made some of the most famous adverts ever. Remember the Levi's ad, with Nick Kamen stripping off in a laundrette? That was one of their earliest advertisments. They were responsible for all of those Levi's adverts, and still are. Flat Eric? That was them. The twisted-jeans adverts, with people's limbs and teeth and so on being warped? That was Bartle Bogle Hegarty. One of my favourite adverts, for the aforementioned Lynx shower-gel, featured women saying things that men can only dream of.
"Oh how nice! You noticed my breasts!" one girl says.
"I can't believe you collect comic books too!" says another.
"I was wondering if my best friend could join us."
"Of course you can borrow some money for a lapdance, darling"
"She meant nothing to you?!......well........when you put it like that...okay, I forgive you"
"Oh no. If I wanted foreplay, I would've asked for it"
Obviously it's fairly chauvinistic, but the point is that they knew exactly who they were targetting. Can anyone remember the Lynx adverts before they revolved around "The Lynx Effect"? Of course not. If there's one thing BBH do exceedingly well, it's make their clients famous. Oh, and cast extremely good-looking women in their adverts. Thankyou, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, for that advert. If you've got a few minutes to kill, head over to the Bartle Bogle Hegarty website, go to the Showroom and watch the Lynx quicktime adverts. The second one in particular. Classic. It's an excellent example of perfect advertising strategy. It's utterly flawless. They know exactly who they're targeting, how to reach them, the right quantities of humour and brand-placement, everything. It's the perfect advert, right there. Seriously, go take a look.
For more recent stuff, and actually for part of the reason I started this entry, look no further than the new Barclays bank adverts. The ones with Samuel L. Jackson walking through different climates, reciting bizarre orations. There's 4 of them in total, and I only recall seeing 3 so far. Each one features a different climate (snow, rain and sunshine so far), a different speech, and a different animal at the end. They're directed by Jonathan Glazer, who helmed the incredibly successful Guinness adverts (yes, the horses and the surfers), as well as the confusingly popular Levi's 'running-through-walls' ad. Oh, not to mention most of Radiohead's videography. I'm not entirely sure I like the ads, but I do respect the concept behind them. I don't know if anyone remembers the previous Barclays adverts, but they had various talented English actors (Anthony Hopkins and Tim Roth being the most notable) giving very emphatic speeches about how how 'Big' the bank is, and how 'Big' is good. They were, rather interestingly, directed by Ridley Scott. The new adverts though, take a dramatically different approach, the new adverts directly deal with the recent consumer suspicions of big finance. It's a complete reversal, but it's done with such skill that nobody notices. I dunno if anyone noticed, but Egg did the exact opposite to Barclays 'Big' adverts, instead choosing to portray themselves as the consumer's best friend. The adverts, directed by Spike Jonze, featured an Egg representative snuggling up against a customer in his bed, and young children singing "Egg and you, sitting in a tree..." But Bartle Bogle Hegarty are choosing to steer the fine line between the two. Appearing humanistic, but capable. Again, I'm not sure I like the adverts, but that's possibly because they're so densely scripted that it takes several viewings to really understand what's going on. I still don't in the latest one. But there's something about them that makes me feel it's MY fault I'm not getting the message, not theirs. It's as though I really like the idea, but don't like watching the ads themselves. I can't fathom them out.
One thing I have noticed, however, is the recent Vodafone advert features a line from the Barclays ad. I'm not sure if it's a coincidence or what. As far as I know, the Vodafone advert isn't directed by Glazer, nor is it created by Bartle Bogle Hegarty. So unless it's written by Marc Hatfield, Pete Bradly or John O'Keeffe, it has no connection to the Barclays ad whatsoever. This would make it yet another example of wonderfully incestuous advertising. In case you don't know which advert I mean, it starts with a bunch of people waking up. Alarm clocks go off, people jolt awake, stretch, etc etc. One of them is reading from a piece of paper in his hands, which looks like an audition script to me, and says what sounds like "turned his mountain into a hill of beans". That would obviously be the quote that Samuel L. Jackson gives in the first Barclays advert (regarding the little piggy). What I can't work out is if it's a snipe at them, a tribute, or what. I'm intrigued though.
Yes, these are the kind of sad little things that distract me for hours. I am beyond hope.
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