Winter, spring, summer or autumn. All you gotta do is.. er.. caught ‘em? Bought ‘em? Sort ‘em? Thought ‘em? Damn.
This is a loathesome ad. I can’t say exactly why, it just makes my skin crawl. I’m not sure where in the marketing lexicon ‘crawling skin’ is listed as a desirable audience reaction but the AA achieve by the bucketload.
There are some ads where the turgid workings of the ad agency are clearly visible. This is one. You can almost hear the ‘creatives’ round the table congratulating each other on this idea. Fall, call – brilliant. Real AA people! What a statement! What a team-builder!
I don’t know whether our dredded friend at the end is a talented AA man (hoping for that big singing break that will pluck him from roadside obscurity) or a session singer in a bib – and frankly, I don’t care. All I know is that he’s doing that jaw-warbling-overkill thing that proper singers do to prove they’re proper.
And as for that poor mumbling bloke in the fake blizzard..
Looks like I beat the Guardian to it. The same ad gets a high-visibility drubbing in Alex Rayner’s ‘Hard Sell’ column in the Guide (25th – 31st Aug). Being a journalist his piece may be far more eloquent than mine (“Non-threateningly hunky, goateed and toothsome, these boys are the kind of people that you – ethnic hat-wearing, old banger-driving, lovelorn people of Britain – want as your friend.”) – but I’ve got the satisfaction of doing it first.