Loose cannon: Robert Kirby
It is never quite possible to store up enough cynicism for use as a protective membrane between oneself and advertising. Membrane be damned, these days you need armour-plating to keep the witness of the creative directors, the visualisers and the rest of the snake-oil salesmen from getting through to you. It has always been a losing battle.
Of course advertising isn’t all bad. It’s just that these days, as there’s so much more of it, the ratio of bad to good seems more evident.
I don’t quite know where or what advertising is the most banal or the most offensive, but I would imagine that selling things by means of playing on people’s instinctual terrors must figure pretty low on the list.
Whole books are written regularly on how advertising changes cultures and on how it has become necessary to our happiness and balance. There are whole academic disciplines on the subject. But you and I, in our own ways, are left to cope with most of what gets dumped on us.
Much of the time the personal armour keeps us safe – at least in the conscious sense we ignore or dismiss the hustle for what it is.
But now and then up comes an advert which slips through the defences and truly disgusts. Like the lubricious “quickie” campaign recently mounted by Old Mutual which exploits the government’s recent – if grimly overdue – HIV/Aids wake-up call.
Old Mutual has taken a full page in the newspapers. Printed right across the top of the page – in vast letters lest we pass it by – are the words “Dear President Mandela”.
This hoarse bellow is followed with the smarmy line: “In response to your plea to the nation to join in a partnership in the struggle against Aids, Old Mutual commits to this pledge.” This is printed in a withdrawn serif script.
I suppose if you are going to run advertising copy which reads likes a parody of a corrupt Scoutmaster probing someone’s cloaca with his tongue, you may as well dress the script to look as gentlemanly as you can.
Then comes the body copy. This takes the form of investigating in detail what the Scoutmaster’s tongue has dislodged: 17 little paragraphs which complement each other in trendy can’t- speak.
Most of these 17 sub-pledges are virtually without meaning, unless there is something to be snuffled out from their Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi- like phraseology.
A line like “We will continue to evaluate our policies and practices to keep them in line with current HIV/Aids needs and developments” is lip- trembling gobbledegook. So is “We will advise employers, labour unions and other key stakeholders on the impact of Aids on benefit plans for employees.”
Later in Old Mutual’s timely pledge we come across not only “key stakeholders” but also “key decision makers”. There are all manner of “initiatives aimed at specific groups …” and tepid promises to “encourage people to adopt a caring attitude”. And loads and loads of something called the “HIV status”.
Who dreams up this exploitative slush? And what manner of self-respecting, highly-educated, “caring” senior executive – like Gerhard van Niekerk: Group Managing Director of Old Mutual who signed this “letter” – can actually bring himself to do so?
How is this for huckster-burble? One of the closing lines in the advertisement reads (with original punctuation): “Since 1986, when Old Mutual first approached the government and key decision makers in the various countries in which we operated with our concerns about Aids, we have adopted a holistic approach to our business responsibilities and our social responsibilities concerning the crisis.”
That is pristine bollocks, Mr van Niekerk. It is without meaning. It is vacant. It is pretentious. And apart from its cosy bombast, you should, as a matter of urgency, encourage the key stakeholders among your dedicated specific advertising management resource-persons to employ a copywriter who at least has been introduced to the comma.
Perhaps I overestimate the market intelligence. Perhaps Old Mutual’s key stakeholders are purposely down- marketing in the belief that the boobies out there don’t know or, worse, don’t deserve any better.
But as a South African who, for as long as I can remember, has been aware of an enduring establishment called Old Mutual, it doesn’t sit at all well.
Old Mutual has always been a symbol of corporate sanity, restraint and good old conservative respectability.
This kind of crude sentimentality is of the cheaper tricks of advertising. And it comes across for exactly what it is: as curdled as a politician’s soul.