Advertising works, as the poor fools who bought the new Candice single can bear grim testimony to. Apparently South Africa’s advertising industry is one of the best in the world, but frankly that doesn’t mean a whole lot when you look at some of the competition.
European ads are about as much fun as Finland. In China they blow up your house and imprison your only child if you don’t buy Chairman Mao Democratic Synthetic Cheese.
India has a middle class greater than the entire population of the United States. That’s about five taxi-loads of people heading for the Ciskei at Christmas. But this holy cash cow remains relatively elusive as the country’s advertising gurus face the fact that there are 15 times as many Indian gods as there are Indians.
Pepsi and MRF (a tyre-manufacturing company) may have turned Sachin Tendulkar into the God of Cover-Drives, but he’s still got to get in line behind Armichand the Nine-Fingered God of Band-Aids and Chunki the Frustrated Six-Armed God of Cling Wrap. At last, realising the impossibility of creating enthusiasm for worldly things in a culture founded on supernatural hype, the ad men get straight to the point. ‘Got leprosy? Sachin is the lift you need!”
For some reason the awards continue to elude New Dehli’s top agencies —
Which brings us a back to South Africa and a nagging question about its ad industry: if it’s so good, how does one account for the marketing campaigns of Supersport and South African Airways?
The latter’s sports-related adverts are merely embarrassing. Their sucks-to-you World Cup campaign could have been worse, if they’d pitched it at eight-year-olds, for example, instead of their target market — socially retarded narcissistic 10-year-olds. We’ll let them get on with losing money at an astonishing rate.
But Supersport should know better. Actually that’s not true. It has done nothing in its history to dissuade one from thinking that its marketing department is staffed by a team of the above mentioned pre-teens, a festering sludge of human detritus incapable of higher reason, with fingers wedged far up nostrils and tongues lolling in idiot glee.
These are, after all, the people that used to advertise Test cricket with images of batsmen being felled by bouncers, intercut with charming footage of a skull on a stick being shattered by a cricket ball.
Apparently some senior marketing exec finally tore himself away from his ball-pond and Batsman comics and told his lackeys to get some culture, resulting in a shift away from the obvious analogies of tribal bloodshed to the even more obvious analogies of modern warfare.
What Super 12 rugby has to do with the battle for Iwo Jima in World War II is beyond me, but that campaign’s most famous image — the raising of a flag by marines — has been transplanted on to South Africa’s screens and broadsheets as a misguided attempt at martial gong-banging. Unfortunately the final result — six or seven sweaty blokes in tiny shorts grasping at a big pole — looks more homoerotic than heroic.
Tennis, too, has been subjected by Supersport to the Saving Private Ryan treatment. While one can just see the faintest connection between war and playing under-13 rugby (moments of absolute terror, eternities of deathly boredom), watching André Agassi drill a forehand down the line to the sound of machine-gun fire is an astonishing outing into the mind of the lowest common denominator.
Grim sweaty faces are shown as the narrator makes some half-arsed attempt at sounding like Winston Churchill, and we’re supposed to believe that Lleyton Hewitt is going through hell on Earth, a trial by hot lead, instead of prancing about on a big flat lawn, being paid a zillion bucks for playing a game.
All this might explain why Supersport is not covering the current Test series in Bangladesh: its marketing monkeys couldn’t think of an appropriate war to doll up. It’s a tricky one, to be sure. They needed a war in which a superpower went and smashed up a small Asian country. Vietnam! But that would require Biff Smith’s players to stay there for two years, slowly losing players to venereal disease and groin-strains, before a final hard-fought defensive draw at Chittagong and a low-key return to Johannesburg International airport.
And to be realistic, if it showed scenes of Jacques Rudolph clubbing baby harp seals or Shaun Pollock lighting up his flame-thrower outside a convent, it still wouldn’t come close to the reality of the current mismatch over there.
War is hell. Supersport ads are worse.