...and so my apologies to my legion of fans, but in between writing for various outlets, I have become employed again. Yes indeedy, some enormous internet concern has decided to pay me for my sage advice and ramblings. Gawd bless 'em. That and I've been to Spain, Switzerland, Ireland and Greece on a semi-sabbatical. T'was grand in Greece, marvellous in Madrid, zany in Zurich and diabolically dull in Dublin.
Never mind all that: what have I missed whilst I've been away?
For a starter, the new Sony advert with the play-dough bunnies. Like 'Paint' and 'Balls', it looks great on my Toshiba LCD and even better on my Pioneer plasma. If it were selling paint and balls and toy putty, they'd be fucking screamers, but they ain't, and they are not. 'Bunnies' takes it's cue from a Japanese artist who created work that gets hung up in Sushi bars all over the world. The rabbits are great...it's just that the point of the advert gets lost when it looks so good on a better telly than the Bravia. That said, Panasonic have just put out something far more unremarkable, yet it may well sell more LCD's because it's got crumpet and scary animals and cars in it.
We've also had the Orange campaign, which has been universally (and rightly) panned for it's tweeness. The latest effort on my screen shows some kids turning a sofa upside down to make...hey, it's a computer...and now they are re-arranging the sofa and cusions and a throw and rug...hey, it's a telephone...with a dial...I ain't seen one of them for decades!! I'll definitely get an Orange plan if I can treat my house and furniture like a bouncy castle.
Talking about mobiles, Apple have introduced the iPhone, and it's a wonderful thing. I know, I have one. However, it's also slow as fuck to get onto the network through it's EDGE comms package, and it's also not a great...phone.
The campaign currently shows people chatting about how they use the iPhone in their daily lives. It's not cutting edge, or breakthrough...which is a shame because the product nearly is. You won't care about the people in this advert. Apple have gone down the solutions demo route, and it looks pretty ordinary.
That said, what to make of the Vodafone campaign. Two of the adverts stick out for extra-special throw-monkey-shit-at-the screen treatment. The first is the pastiche of Groundhog Day where the guy rushes to meet some floozy he's picked up, but hasn't cemented yet. Every time he gets near her...bang he's back in the office. Eventually he goes postal; the advert is cut just after he starts torching his cubicle, and just before he blows away his work colleagues with a Remington.
In the end though, through the power of wifi-net capable devices, he gets to bang the chick and produce like a good worker bee: Vodafone save the day for his cock and his boss. Yes, this advert is not aimed at the individual, but at the corporate sector. It's the most unromantic advert masquerading as a romantic advert you will ever see.
The other advert in the Vodafone 'Make the Most of Now' campaign is a poster I see every time I fly into Dublin Airport. Just as you dive down into the baggage reclaim section, there's this gurning fool staring down at the floor. He's clearly meant to be a Dublin bohemian: a touch of a scally, a touch of a lad, a touch of a professional, a touch of a romantic. He's got a scarf on, just to state that.
He looks like someone who would be lying comatose in a Temple Bar alley at 2.00am covered in kebab lettuce and his own urine.
There's some other stuff. A Toyota advert where some bickering couple wander down the street arguing, get into the piece of Japanese mid-range bore-mobile and magically put aside their differences. See, you are having the Mother of all domestics, you open the door, get in, and voila!! It's mock-leather fascia and sporty dials make all differences seem trivial.
Even if you've just told your wife you really were in love with her sister, the Toyota will save you from a knifing with a 20cm Global. A really bold campaign would have had one of these shot on the West Bank between an Israeli conscript and a Palestinian taxi driver. But they didn't, and the advert is dental floss.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Buying your wife a Porsche will make her stop bitching at you. Not a Toyota.
There's plenty out there which are equally as vacuous and as empty-headed and as bereft of any semblance of a sales sense, but we have all the time in the world to slice and dice them.
Nice to see you again.
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