October 25, 2006

M&S dish up drool-worthy dinners

Unless my banana risotto is served up on time, the butler is saddled with a trip into town to fetch my dinner from Marks & Spencer. That’s the terrible price he pays every time the retailer unleashes yet another of its scandalously tempting food porn ads on the telly. Of course it’s worse when looking at these images on the 100-inch plasma high def screen installed in my drawing room; you could row a boat across the lake of drool emanating from my salivating jaws.
A couple of weeks ago Sam Cartmel of The Red Brick Road committed* a superb hatchet job on this and previous spots from the campaign.

I can only disagree; Rainey Kelly Campbell’s ads for M&S are a prime example of TV advertising at its most basic: showing off the product at its best, accompanied by a sultry eat-me-or-shag-me voiceover. If ad recall and sales are up, who’s going to complain?
Not M&S.

*Adwatch, Marketing magazine, 4/10/06
Agency: RKCR/Y&R


In the interests of research, I dispatched a brace of scantily clad monkeygirls to find a typical ad numpty, and ask his opinion:

monkeygirls m&s
"This ad represents all that is wrong with British society. Just look at that pie. The brown filling topped by the pale crust is subtly reinforcing the domination of our immigrant communities by the white aristocracy. The potato, invented by and stolen from the Irish, represents the land which was invaded by the British Empire. Red wine? The blood of the working classes. And as for that pudding, well it’s obviously celebrating a thousand years of institutionalised child abuse. This sort of pudding was eaten in Victorian times during the reign of Queen Margaret Thatcher. In those days the English used to nail working class children to the walls by their ears and force them to paint the inside of chimneys with dolphin fat. I bet the woman doing the voiceover isn’t even wearing a veil. I will be complaining."

2 comments:

copyranter said...

"paint the inside of chimneys with dolphin fat..."

the best line of prose I've read since I wrote my last one.

SchizoFishNChimps said...

You have my permission to use it in any appropriate campaign