Tag: advertising

Lipsmackingthirstquenchingacetasting…

Talking about the dark ages of communications – I had a weird flashback moment to them this morning when I saw a piece about royal weddings in the paper,  illustrated with a picture from a Charles and Di street party in 1981.

There in the background was a Richard Shop – (a late and unlamented high street fashion chain, for younger readers.)

I could INSTANTLY remember all the words to the Richard Shop TV campaign – if you’re my age I bet you can too (google Richard Shops, there are pages and pages of sites devoted to it).  All together now:

Richard Shops are filled with all the pretty things/ soft and lovely pretty things to wear/  Hey there pretty face/ Make the world a prettier place/ Come pretty face/ Come buy your clothes at Richard Shops 

Thank God I was alone in the kitchen.  It led to a medley of classic 1970s/’80s advertising jingles which would have amazed and astounded my children, had they been there.

So, 2 questions:

  • Where the hell is this stuff stored?  Why can my memory  file and recall it so effectively, without being asked to, when so much else – the date of my next VAT return, for example – seems so much more elusive; and
  • Why don’t advertisers use songs like this in advertising any more?  They evidently imprint brand names on customers’ memories for decades.

I genuinely cannot remember a single recent ad for either Pepsi or Coke, but You Tubing the I’d Like To Buy The World A Coke song bought a nostalgic tear to my eye and, through the lump in my throat,  I could sing along with every word (and I really hate Coke) .

1966 and all that

The spoof 1966 ad has been  on a billboard across the road for a couple of days now.  It makes me smile everytime I see it, although I never did get round to looking up the weblink to find out who was beaming these calming thoughts at my husband and son.  I missed the row about the other spoof ad  – the working women should all be shot one –  until it had all blown over and I stumbled across it on Twitter.

This proves either that a) advertising isn’t as important as the agency wanted to demonstrate; or b)  it is, and the Mumsnet row amply demonstrates the point; or c) it only works when backed up with word of mouth – nowadays massively amplified by Twitter and other social networks;  or d) I’ve been confined to the house by snow and anxiety for much too long and need to get out more.

Spoof advertising isn’t a new tactic, of course.  The Guardian launched a  range of non-existant products when online retail really started to take off, to try to prove that people would sign up for anything if it had a website attached.  And 1966 has been scooped in the spoof advertising stakes this very month by those hilarious  “We can’t go on like this” ads featuring the lollipop-headed David Cameron and some vacuous verbiage about not cutting the NHS.   Hats off to them for testing the boundaries of the medium, of course.  But can’t help thinking they need to hire someone who knows how to use photoshop and a copywriter (and a policy advisor) who might really be capable of making Britain think.