Happy Easter to one and all.
Continuing the traditional disregard for seasonality on this blog, there won’t really be an Easter theme today I’m afraid. You see, I had started with the intention of doing something along these lines, but about half an hour of sifting through the ‘Information-Super-Highway’ really didn’t throw up anything noteworthy.
Every year Easter seems to be more about selling chocolates instead of teaching about Jesus, which is not healthy for a world that is becoming increasingly overweight.
Even a shamelessly hacky plagiarist like me can’t write a whole blog about marketing with bunnies, chocolate eggs and the miraculous revivification of Jesus H. Christ. I mean can you imagine anything as long as a blog post being written about that Nazarene nutcase, come off it!
Having said that, one comment under a blog about Easter ads from 2009 did rather tickle me;
Wise words by Mr. Jacob House Esq. I’ll leave you to ruminate on his sentiments.
I think it would be cheap for me to ridicule his bad grammar Adam Buxton-style, because regular readers will know Im often a culpirt of that. Also he did get up rather early to write his thoughts on ‘Eastervertising’ - bless’im.
So, instead of a run down of the most leporine and chocolatey ads from this time of the year, I thought I’d show you the fruits of a little ‘mind shower’ we had in the Gasp studio a couple of weeks ago.
The brief: Come up with entertaining straplines for a meal deal at a bar in Australia. And here they are:
I should stress that these are the ‘approved’ ones. We actually came up with about five-times this number, but they became increasingly coarse and puerile as the day drew on. Perhaps one day the long list will be published by WikiLeaks or something, if it does I’ll certainly be in trouble I can tell you.
In other news, I’m not sure what to think about this ad for Schweppes by Fred & Farid.
Fair enough I suppose. But it seems they’ve splurged a huge budget and used a very bankable star, executing quite a tired idea, “What did you expect?”
Interesting that they’ve chosen to illustrate this strapline with a lesbian motif, thereby barging onto one of the biggest bandwagons that exists at the moment. It seems there’s a huge craze for airbrushed female homoeroticism right now, from the ‘celesbians’ like Cara Delevingne and Ellen Page to Palme d’Or winner ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’.
It’s angered the genuine LGBT community who rightly claim that Sapphic portrayals in the media generally come from the licentious imagination of heterosexual blokes. This ad can certainly be criticised on these grounds.
However form follows function, and this ad may boost sales of Schweppes ten fold…maybe, perhaps.
But I think the summa of thoughtful reaction to this ad is well summed up by one YouTube commentor who has sagaciously written;
I reckon that’s about as good as Schweppes can expect to be honest…I don’t disagree though.