A ringing endorsement

Once, we all knew where we stood with advertising, especially advertising for products that were actively bad for us, instead of products that we simply didn’t need.  We don’t require any encouragement to buy things we don’t need, but things that are actively bad for us require a little thought.  Specifically, fags and booze.

Time was, it was simple.  Shot of a bloke smoking, or having a drink, or both, with a final five second pack shot so that you knew what packet of fags to look for the next time you were in the fresh vegetable aisle (ahh, simpler, happier times).

Then, things got tricky, as new rules were introduced to stop booze being advertised to children and as making you successful with women, and fags being advertised…er, at all really.  Luckily, the new restrictions on advertising came in at the same time as creativity and coke consumption surged in the ad agencies and ad budgets blossomed to ensure that your average TV fag ad had a bigger budget than Bond and more creative talent working on it than ‘Blade Runner’, and booze adverts became funnier than the ITV sitcoms that interrupted them.

Now, there’s no money to buy coke or film big budget ads and the created world can’t compete with the reality, which is that if you go to the pub and nip out into the storm to smoke your fag, your bird will have been pulled by the time you get back by a non-smoker with a gym membership or a sports car (either, but not both, affordable with the money he’s saved on fags), a taste for wine and, probably, a sex dungeon.

Instead, manufacturers have turned to subtler means to influence our buying decisions, such as product placement. 

When James Bond was washed up, in hiding and hopelessly out of condition in ‘Skyfall’ his booze of choice was Heineken.  He may as well have been drinking cider on a park bench.  Once he got himself sorted out it was back on the vodka martinis but the message was clear – drink booze!

So in times when advertising budgets are stretched and audiences are sophisticated to a degree that a pack shot of a horsemeat lasagne with the phrase ‘buy me!’ flashing on the screen twenty times a second is more likely to have people running to post abuse on Twitter than running to the supermarket, manufacturers are working hard to associate their products with success and things that are high profile, or beloved, or both. 

This means that premiership soccer teams have their sponsor’s logo shirts, stadiums are renamed after tile grout or whatever and from 2014 anyone getting a tattoo of their soccer team emblem will be legally obliged to have the name of the sponsor added below.

I’d like to see endorsement and sponsorship developed.  There are, oh I don’t know, bloody hundreds of soccer leagues and thousands of teams, surely if top-tier soccer is supported by global brands then lesser teams should be sponsored by second and third division products, more poundland than premiership.  There must be loads of obscure stuff out there that could benefit from a marketing push; energy drinks imported from North Korea?  Snacks featuring horsemeat, because horsemeat has proved hugely popular, and that was before people knew it WAS horse.  Just re-brand Findus frozen lasagne as ‘Jockey Jerky’ and away you go!  And what about brands that are big in New Zealand or Australia – ‘Kangerpee, the true taste of Brisbane’.

Apple are famous for their product placement, in films maverick computer geniuses rarely save the world using anything other than a powerbook.  What’s noteworthy is that Apple have taken product placement to a new level by product placing in real life, making a deal ensuring that every Starbucks coffee shop must have at least one person in it using a powerbook.  Early tests where that person was a bloke with a beard working on the script for his documentary which he hopes will be filmed in black and white have been so successful that later this year Apple will role out its upgrade – ‘hot girl using laptop while wearing huge headphones over a knitted cap.’