Pretentious? This ad should be entered for the Turner Prize!
12/10/2010

Press advertising is often seen as a poor relation to TV and on-line advertising, so the ANNAs – Awards for National Newspaper Advertising – are a welcome celebration of this noble art, and I’ve been following this year’s nominations with interest, amusement and, of course, outrage – well, awards are nothing if not controversial, and all the better for it I reckon.  Where would us grumpy old men be without something to whinge about?!

The year got off to a rousing start with a powerful ad for RT News using a dramatic double exposure of a riot policemen and protester, matched with a provocative headline – ‘Who is the more dangerous?’.  A perfect example of copywriter and art director working hand in glove.  And trenchant body copy to follow.  Love it.  And there are plenty more from this stable.

As a copywriter myself it rather sticks in my craw to admit that the nominations for February and March – for Land Rover and Channel  4 – both worked brilliantly without a headline (what are revered ancestor David Ogilvy would have called a ‘headless wonder’, although in this case they were rather wonderful, dammit!)

The Land Rover ad featured a superb shot of a snowscape (I can’t begin to describe it, so check it out on-line, I’ll give you the URL in a minute).  The Channel 4 ad for the Chancellor’s Live Debate showed the budget briefcase wired up like a terrorist’s bomb, a nice conceptual piece that neatly expressed the explosive opinions that would no doubt be aired on the programme.
April’s nominee was a witty April Fool joke for BMW which invited you to ‘Show your true colours this election’, with a BMW bonnet badge available in red, blue or yellow.  Plausible enough to fool you at first glance, but sharing a joke and establishing a rapport with the reader.  Deftly done.

Now forgive me if I begin to gush, but May brought us an all copy ad for the VW Polo.  You’ll remember this one: ‘A Polo is £9,790. Honestly, a Polo is £9,790.  It’s true …’ etc.  Simple, but effective, and a nice validation of the strapline: ‘Unbelievable value’.  One grumble: why did the text have to hand drawn?  It seems to be the fashion these days to emulate scribbles out of a kid’s exercise book, but it rather undermined the authority of the production in this case.

June was another headless wonder, this time for Virgin Atlantic, who was celebrating its appointment as Official Airline of the England Team.  It showed a player with arms extended and his football shirt pulled over his head.  Idiotic, but well matched to its demographic.

OK, enough Mr Nice Guy, the strain is beginning to tell.  July’s nominee was again for Land Rover, but oh what a descent from the snow capped heights of February!  It majored on the four-wheeler’s dubious USP – its ability to look over the heads of other drivers, or in this case the dry stone wall of a country lane.  The copy ‘Hello flowers, hello trees, hello cows’ etc. struck me as jejune, and a pale imitation of the Milton Keynes corporate commercial, which put its words in the mouth of a kid and was built on a much sounder strategy.

But my booby prize goes to August’s nominee, the Renault Megane ad.  If anything it should have been entered for the Tate’s Turner Prize, it’s that pretentious and self-indulgent.  The ad is one in a series of ‘reports’ from  a spoof research project – The Megane Experiment – which asks ‘Can a car change a town?’   This ad compares Menton, Cote d’Azur (Lingerie shops: 2, No. of Megane: 21) with Gisburn, Lancashire (Lingerie shops: 0, No. of Megane: 0). And, er, that’s it.

I suppose, in some obscure way, it’s trying to suggest the Megan is sexy or glamorous, and it just goes to show how being overly PC can tie you up in knots.  Bring back the glory days when Fiat could run an ad headlined ‘If this car were a lady, it would get its bottom pinched’.  Famously, it attracted feminist graffiti that read ‘If this lady was a car, she’d run you down’.  Great stuff, and it generated its own viral campaign into the bargain!

We’ve still got the last quarter to go, but on the present showing my nominee for ANNA ad of the year is January’s ad for RT News.  Check them all out yourself at www.the-annas.co.uk and feel free to disagree with me.