"Sainsbury’s defends Christmas advert as customers threaten to boycott store for featuring black family"

From The Metro

Since it was first aired, the advert has received controversial feedback online, with some slamming the commercial for ‘not representing them’.

Others went as far as to say they were boycotting Sainsbury’s because of their ad. One shopper tweeted: ‘Isn’t the UK supposed to be all about Diversity and Inclusion? Don’t see any of that here. Virtual signalling if ever I’ve seen it!’

I have some sympathy for Sainsbury's here. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Clearly, the UK is a 'white' country and 95% of the population consider themselves 'White British'. So if supermarkets always just featured a median family in their adverts, they would all be all white. Which, while fairly accurate, would be a bit boring. And they'd get grief from the virtue signallers (who are all white, rather ironically).

If all supermarkets just used the median family, then we would only see white families, which might be a fair reflection of many parts of the country, but completely out of kilter with larger cities. So a lot of them cop out by having a mixed race family with one white and one non-white* parent.

But, even though I am half of a mixed race couple with mixed race kids, I find this really irritating. It's the least representative kind of family, that's basic maths. Even if every single non-white person married a white person, that's still only one-in-ten families. Clearly they don't, so in truth is more like one-in-a-hundred.

So Sainsbury's marketing team thought "Fuck it, this is all too complicated. We'll never improve on plugboy. Whatever else we do will offend somebody, so for a change let's have an all-black family."

And good for them, to be honest. If a supermarket did an Xmas advert featuring a family of green CGI Martians, would anybody bat an eyelid?

* You're not allowed to say 'coloured' any more (as Greg Clarke found out to his cost, seriously, you can lose your job for this). Hilariously enough we did a 'racial sensitivity' nonsense course at work a couple of years ago and the lecturer insisted that we say 'people of colour', or 'BIPOC', completely made-up phrases which were deemed to be offensive a few weeks ago. 'Black' is the preferred term again for Afro-Caribbeans (they've always described to themselves as 'black' AFAIAA). You have to keep up to date with these things!

A survivor from a parallel apocalyptic universe speaks...

From the BBC:

A new campaign called "Badvertising" is demanding an immediate end to adverts for large polluting cars...

Andrew Simms, one author, said: "We ended tobacco advertising when we understood the threat from smoking to public health. Now that we know the human health and climate damage done by car pollution, it’s time to stop adverts making the problem worse. There’s adverts, and then there’s badverts, promoting the biggest, worst emitting SUVs is like up-selling pollution, and we need to stop."

I've no sympathy with people who drive unnecessarily large vehicles (whether gas guzzler or SUV, it's all just conspicuous consumption and a pain in the arse for pedestrians and people in sensibly sized cars), but I doubt that an advertising ban is going to make the slightest bit of difference.

The car manufacturers probably won't care too much. The main purpose of advertising is to retain market share and not increase the size of the overall market. So it's an arms race and an advertising ban is a straight cost-saving.

But it gets funnier. The Stigler, on Twitter, asked:

Andrew Simms? The bloke from NEF who was saying we only have 100 months to save the planet from irreversible climate change back in 2008?

Presumably.

The original Peloton advert reminds of a chapter from Nineteen Eighty-Four

From here:

The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It was nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for office workers. Winston wrenched his body out of bed -- naked, for a member of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons annually, and a suit of pyjamas was 600 -- and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair. 

The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes. The next moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit which nearly always attacked him soon after waking up. It emptied his lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing again by lying on his back and taking a series of deep gasps. His veins had swelled with the effort of the cough, and the varicose ulcer had started itching.

'Thirty to forty group!' yapped a piercing female voice. 'Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to forties!'

Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already appeared.

'Arms bending and stretching!' she rapped out. 'Take your time by me. One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! ...'

The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of Winston's mind the impression made by his dream, and the rhythmic movements of the exercise restored it somewhat. As he mechanically shot his arms back and forth, wearing on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was considered proper during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling to think his way backward into the dim period of his early childhood...

Stand easy!' barked the instructress, a little more genially.

Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air.

The instructress had called them to attention again. 'And now let's see which of us can touch our toes!' she said enthusiastically. 'Right over from the hips, please, comrades. One-two! One- two! ...'

Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way from his heels to his buttocks and often ended by bringing on another coughing fit.

'Smith!' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! That's better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.'

A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body. His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away. He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above her head and -- one could not say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency -- bent over and tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.

'There, comrades! That's how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I'm thirty-nine and I've had four children. Now look.' She bent over again. 'You see my knees aren't bent. You can all do it if you want to,' she added as she straightened herself up. 'Anyone under forty-five is perfectly capable of touching his toes. Now try again. That's better, comrade, that's much better,' she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.

Why on earth anybody would pay £2,000 to be subjected to this rubbish is a mystery to me.

I misread this Met Police advert on the Tube

Who buys new cars?

Emailed in by MBK, from The Times:

Here’s a surprising thing. The average age of a new car buyer in the UK is 54. The majority of new cars are bought by people in their fifties, sixties and seventies. The average age of a new Ford buyer, for example, is 56. For Volkswagen it is 54. For Toyota it is 63. Even cheap, fun, youngster-friendly Fiats are bought by people whose average age is a relatively ancient 49.

That doesn't surprise me at all and I'd always assumed this was the case:

1. Older people have more money, less sense and are more averse to risk and hassle, so are more likely to buy new. Younger people vice versa.

2. Assuming people pass their driving test in their twenties and pack in driving when they are 70 or 80, the average age of all car drivers is about 50, so we'd expect the average age of all car buyers to be about 50, with a slightly younger average for second hand car buyers and a slightly older average age for new car buyers.

If these ages seem high, it’s because we have been conditioned to believe that it’s the young who buy new cars, thanks to those jolly TV commercials featuring carefree twentysomethings heading to the beach together in a gleaming convertible. Even the ads for high-end roadsters shot in moody empty landscapes seem to favour wrinkle-free granite-jawed chaps well under 45.

Amen brother, most car adverts are vacuous crap. Apart from the one for the MX-5 where the bloke drove from the suburbs to a petrol station in the middle of the desert, bought a pint of milk and drove home again.
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The surprising thing about the articles is the Baby Boomer vitriol in the comments:

Well the young don't typically really own cars do they.

They lease them and lots of my friends talk about how "its only £320 a month" as if its not a great deal of money. When you point out to them that often at the end of the deal they have nothing to show for it, they don't seem too bothered.

Furthermore plenty of young people don't even consider the purchase of a car (let alone a new one) possible, with sky high insurance, tax and fuel costs. If they live in a city they may as well forget it and uber/bus/cycle everywhere.

Jeez. In commercial terms, it makes little difference whether you are renting a new car for £320 a month or actually own it outright and are losing £320 a month in depreciation. Is he accusing young people of wasting their money on cars, or slagging them off for turning up their noses at them? Does he not realise that the statistics on car buyers include HP and FL deals? Or is this some sort of projected self-loathing? Lighten up, mate!

The young need to work harder - I've been buying new cars since I was 25.

The first Boomer says young people can afford to buy cars but a lot of them don't want to waste their money on them (and good for them). The next Boomer says they can't afford to buy new cars because they don't work hard enough. This was not an income comparison, you fuckwit, it was about who buys new cars.

Photoshop fail

The first thing I noticed is the kink in the jetty behind the bloke's knee on the right. On closer inspection, the shadows look weird as well:

Satire copies satire

VIZ, September 2014, spoof advert for an 'off-road' vehicle with the slogan "Primary school halfway up a fucking mountain? No problem."

Newsthump, February 2018, spoof article titled "Range Rover launch new 4×4 for people whose local Waitrose is halfway up a mountain".

Questions to which the answer is "no"

From the BBC:

Gambling ads: Would a pre-watershed ban protect young people?

This is an ineffective solution to a non-existent problem. Fun article though, they're really jumping the shark.

Next.

I really like the new Nationwide song

Celebrities and advertising

I have not kept exact tabs on this, but there is a pattern to the type of advertisements featuring celebrities.

Adverts for something real that you can judge on its own merits like mass market cars, furniture or white goods, tend not to feature celebrities. You can test drive a car, decide whether you like the styling, compare its fuel economy and so on. You can test sit on a sofa and decide whether it's comfy or not.

There's a good list of the reasons why advertisers use celebrities here, but it is just as interesting to look at the type of products they are used for and work backwards from that.

Celebrities tend to appear in adverts for the following, in no particular order:

1. Supermarkets, which are essentially all the same, they sell the same products for the same prices in the same way. So they try to differentiate themselves by using celebrities, apart from Aldi and Lidl which mainly compete on price, so their adverts just compare prices for their own brand goods with similar branded products. This also applies to Littlewoods and Very.

2. Luxury items/conspicuous consumption like really expensive watches, which don't tell the time any better than a £15 Casio. In fact, even a Casio is superfluous if you are carrying a mobile phone.

3. Lifestyle things/conspicuous consumption which serve no useful purpose especially perfume, which all seem to follow exactly the same template and are incredibly dull. In contrast to mass market cars, luxury car makers are far more likely to use celebrities/racing drivers. The same goes for fitness paraphernalia like Kate Hudson/Fabletics, these ghastly fitness trackers and gym memberships. People buy sportswear in the vague hope it will encourage them to actually go jogging etc but usually never do. I'm pretty sure that ninety percent of all fitness gear is only used once or twice.

4. Generic white label products like price comparison/estate agent and gambling websites, where one price comparison/estate agent or gambling website is the same as any other, what these sites needs is some sort of critical mass of users especially price comparison websites, if you are number one, then everybody wants to advertise with you, if you are number two or three then far fewer people will advertise with you.

5. Things which are cheap to produce but can be sold for prices that include a lot of rent, like replica football kits, which the teams advertise for free each time their match is broadcast. This also applies to chocolate, as much as I love chocolate every now and then, it all tastes the same to me.

6. Cable television and mobile phones. Companies which have their own content (Netflix, Sky) can advertise their programmes; BT, EE, Virgin etc do not have own content so it uses celebrities.

I can't quite boil that down to one common theme. To be mundane about it, it's about product differentiation or creating a demand for what is a perceived value-added service rather than the product itself.

The joker in the pack is Gary Lineker advertising Walker's Crisps, which are pretty much the best crisps for the price if you buy multipacks in the supermarket. You can judge them on their merits and either you like them or you don't, so why on earth they pay Gary Lineker or Paddy McGuinness a fortune to get on everybody's nerves is a mystery to me. Those adverts are truly awful and always have been. Coca Cola does a lot of advertising, but by and large they don't use celebrities and their adverts are usually pretty good.

Stupid advertising slogan

The one for Quorn, where Mo Farah is running a burger van has annoyed me for ages. The slogan is:

"When healthy food tastes great, you forget it's healthy"

This slogan makes more sense if you invert it completely:

"When unhealthy food tastes great, you forget it's unhealthy"

"When booze tastes great, you forget it will give you a hangover"

"When you're high on opioids, you forget that an overdose can kill you"

Etc etc etc.

Interesting layout.

From The Metro a couple of days ago. On the left is a Tory advert and on the right is a Virgin NTL advert. By whatever coincidence, the Virgin NTL advert matches the bottom half of the Tory advert almost perfectly:

Advertising Standards Agency on top form.

From the BBC:

Three adverts for hotel website Booking.com, where the word "booking" was seen to be used in the place of a swear word, were the second, fourth and seventh most-complained about ads of the year - with 683, 407 and 201 complaints respectively.

The complaints were not upheld, with the ASA saying "it was a light-hearted play on words that couldn't be mistaken for an actual swear word. To give you an example, if I were to say something like 'Lighten up, you miserable fuckers!', then that would clearly be an actual swear word. The word 'book', on the other hand, is not an actual swear word. Can some people not tell the difference any more?"

Fun Online Polls: Storm names, advertising and shaving.

The results to last week's poll were as follows:

Which was your favourite storm name so far? (Multiple choices allowed)
Abigail - 3 votes
Barney - 0 votes
Clodagh - 2 votes
Desmond - 0 votes
Eva - 0 votes
Frank - 2 votes
Gertrude fka Jonas - 3 votes
Henry - 0 votes
None. The practice is very silly - 80 votes

Lighten up, people!
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I watch a fair amount of telly and hence a fair amount of advertising.

The old rule is that there is no point advertising a completely generic product like potatoes or sugar. People will probably buy them anyway, and if one farmer/producer reminds people how great his potatoes are, at best people will buy more potatoes, but they are just as likely to buy somebody else's. So it is only industry-wide organisations who would pay for it.

At the other extreme are products which are totally unique to the producer, they don't really need to be advertised either. If you need that product, you will buy it from the sole supplier, so Rolls Royce don't need to advertise their cars.

Most advertising seems to be for companies/products in the middle ground - cars, banks, online betting, price comparison sites - these are all much of a muchness, they are generic products but with some market segmentation.

- If you buy Car X, you will need to buy replacement parts for it in future. This overlaps with Indian Bicycle Marketing - cars are marketed as manly cars, girly cars, family cars, hipster cars and middle aged cars.
- If you open an account with Bank X, then you are unlikely to switch accounts for several years;
- If you have opened an online betting account with your "free £10 to play", you are likely to stick with them for while (or at least until you have lost more than your "free £10 to play"); and
- Price comparison sites. If you can get more customers, you get more advertisers, which means more customers etc.

Something else which irks is the amount of advertising for disposable razors. There's Gillette and Wilkinson's, who have been locked in mortal combat since the dawn of time (like Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola) with increasing outlandish claims.

Since The Onion spoof from 2004, Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades, they really did go to five blades or here. On the other hand, you see relatively little advertising for dry/electric shavers.

I assume it's because people replace them so seldom, but it might be that it's only a very small market share and most people use disposables.

So that's what I need to find out: "Do you use a dry/electric shaver or disposables?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

For the record, I tried disposables briefly when I was a teenager, hated it (rash, cuts etc) and have used an electric shaver ever since.

Fun Online Polls: Charity spending & Sports Lack Of Personality Of The Year Award

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

How much of their income do major UK charities actually spend on charitable causes?

Next to nothing - 21%
A quarter - 41%
Half - 25%
Three quarters - 8%
Nearly all - 5%

It appears that taking major UK 'charities' as a whole, 'about half' is the correct answer, some do worse, some do better.

I think there are two separate issues here. The people at the top - an army of trustees, directors, advisors, auditors and lawyers - just help themselves.

And then there is the issue of fund raising. See my earlier post. A charity ends up as a profit maximising organisation, so if they can spend £9 on fund raising to generate £10 in donations, they will do so. Little wonder that some charities spend most of their 'income' on fund raising.
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This week's Fun Online Poll...

It appears to me that most of the candidates in the BBC's list of finalists have not done anything remarkable this year and/or have a distinct lack of personality i.e. they will do or say nothing to upset their sponsors or The Establishment i.e. the BBC.

So let's do the decent thing and have a Sports Lack Of Personality Of The Year Award. Please vote for the candidate who has achieved least in the last twelve months; does not appear to utter anything apart from platitudes; and/or who appears most often in advertisements. Failing that, just vote for somebody you've never heard of (half of them, in my case).

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar. Just to lighten things up, you are allowed one vote per day if you feel that more than one person meets all those criteria.

Oh… so that's what a "life coach" is for.

From today's Evening Standard 'ES' magazine, which is a glorious mixture of pretentiousness, self-publicity, sycophancy, product placement, stealth advertising and, er, advertising:

Location, location, location

From The Evening Standard:

One of the world’s most famous advertising hoardings is up for sale for the first time in 24 years.

The prime slot on the Piccadilly Lights, the electronic display at Piccadilly Circus, is on the market after Japanese firm TDK’s contract ended.

Insiders suggested Land Securities, the owner of the celebrated London landmark opposite the Eros statue, could get in the region of £4 million a year for the spot, which measures 21.1 metres by 4.8 metres.

That's a lot of money - and that's only one out of six spaces. And why is the site so valuable..?

Outdoor advertising consultancy Wildstone is advising Land Securities. An estimated 2 million people a week pass the site.

And how do 99% of those people get to Piccadilly Circus? Using public transport is how.

So why shouldn't Transport for London send Land Securities an invoice every year, and charge them (say) 10p for every person passing the six spaces each year, £10 million all in?

Putting the 'fun' into 'funeral'

I just noticed this at the tfl.gov.uk:
Weird.

We are doomed, I tell you, doomed.

From the BBC:

Supermarket giant Morrisons cannot rebroadcast an advert for burgers after a watchdog ruled that it "condoned poor nutritional habits".

The TV commercial showed a mother preparing a burger for her daughter while they talk about school.

The girl then removes the salad, onion and tomato from the burger and leaves them on the side of her plate.

The Advertising Standards Authority ruled that this "suggested she was not going to eat the salad later".

It didn't "suggest" anything:


And Morrisons' defence...

Morrisons was represented at the hearing by industry body Clearcast, which approved the advertisement before it went on air.

It argued that "the daughter did not look disdainfully at the salad items or make a face that implied she did not like them or would not eat them in the future" and that "it was perfectly feasible that she would return to it later".

Pathetic.

Cathedral City