A little over a year ago, Absa unclipped its sock-suspenders and stepped gingerly into the synthetic amniotic goo of the rebirthing pool. A branding guru stood nearby, revelling in his essences by smelling his armpits, while a swathe of Johannesburg copywriters hovered anxiously behind him, holding bundles of swaddling clothes and invoices.
The rebranding that followed has attached itself, spore-like, to the national consciousness. Months later, we can still recall the television advertisements (“My bank is my infatuation with wordy masturbation, a suburban McMansion Nirvana masquerading as a life less ordinary…”) and when we think of aspirational banking, we see Absa red. In retrospect it was a hugely successful campaign, its intellectual vigour inversely proportional to its visceral impact.
At the time, though, some critics were less impressed. Indeed, this column suggested that the entire process had been carried out by a band of rhesus monkeys, chained to typewriters, and watched over by crack addicts. And that was where the irony ended; for it seemed that the crack addicts were affronted. Or perhaps it was the rhesus monkeys. But whoever it was, for a brief week unsubstantiated rumours reached your correspondent that he was one more wisecrack away from being sued for defamation.
This was, of course, too touching for words, but also posed a wonderful paradox; for how would the aggrieved party go about making a case when its industry’s raison d’être was the perfection and polishing of the carefully crafted insult?
There is nothing about an advertisement that is not the most hostile assault on the mind and reputation of its target. It is a golem, malformed and festering with vile assumption and viler aspersions; and in the space of half a minute it wipes its noxious little arse on everything that elevates the humanity it can never understand. It says:
I have barged uninvited into your evening’s entertainment, and still you watch, because your mind is either malleable or defunct. I will speak for only 30 seconds, because that is all it will take, because your critical facilities have the consistency of porridge. I know you don’t want or need what I’m selling, but I suspect you may just be stupid enough not to know it yourself; and while you vacillate, I will fellate your greed and your fear. And yes, you are greedy, and you are fearful. No? Well, up yours then. Until next time, sucker.
Of course, not all advertisements are this witty. Some say worse things. And sometimes they reveal sentiments so ugly that one is left winded by the glimpse into their creators’ heads. Enter Stanlib…
For those who have not yet seen its new television spot, and been overwhelmed by the urge to take a flamethrower to the parking garage of the nearest Stanlib office, the advertisement is simple, attractively filmed, elegantly packaged and infinitely debased.
On both sides of a split screen, the same middle-aged white man leaves his office and makes his way home to his wife. The man on the left is not a Stanlib client. His identical incarnation on the right is. Both figures stop en route to buy the wife a gift, and both are welcomed at the door with a kiss. And this is where it gets ugly, because in order to understand this glimpse into moral filth, and to want to buy the product on offer, you need to believe that the man on the left has a life that doesn’t measure up to that of the man on the right.
Few ads on South African television have ever had the nerve — or the rampant, unchecked psychopathology — to spell it out as explicitly: a regular job is not good enough, and neither are a comfortable 10-year-old suit or a 20-year-old Volvo. A warmly lit apartment full of personal knick-knacks is worth rejecting if one can have a designer pad with Top Billing acrylics on the walls. A wife who adores you and wears a cardigan is less desirable than the same wife, who adores you as much, and wears labels.
But most insulting is the chilling denigration of the “poor” man’s tokens of love. A bottle of wine and a bunch of flowers symbolise failure alongside a bottle of champagne and a diamond necklace. Honest effort is mocked by the clichéd props of ostentation.
Stanlib and its rhesus monkeys have insulted every hard-working man who ever did something out of love without a thought for how much status it would gain him. They have insulted me, as a sentient human, and because they have come into my home to insult me, and my father, and all the other white middle-class men who have so much more than so many others, I have no qualms about calling them what they are: loathsome.