The golden age of advertising

A trip down memory lane to the 1980s when the best things on television and in the cinema were often booze adverts.

Do you remember when adverts used to be your friend's cool older sister, the one who wore 501s with penny loafers and said that you would break hearts one day? Now they're either the disapproving neighbour who reports you to the council for garden waste in the general bin or the annoying little brother listening to Baby Shark on repeat on an iPad.

Local hero Keith Rayner captured the moronic nature of much advertising in a letter to the Daily Telegraph last year:

"A man is in a lift. He puts some chewing gum in his mouth, gets out of the lift and dances. Why? A couple in an advertisement for a new kitchen dance all over the place. Why? A man is sitting in a car he is wanting to buy. He gets out of the car and dances. Why?"

There are all sorts of reasons why adverts are now crap. We can blame the lack of money in the industry, fragmentation of media, the rise of Google, a lack of shared culture, or something to do with AI. Answers on a postcard. You can see the vast gulf between the two eras by looking at two Heineken adverts which are only about 30 years apart.

The first was the 'water in Majorca' advert from the mid-'80s in which a posh girl goes to 'The School of Street Credibility' to learn how to speak cockney from a grizzled old geezer. She is failing miserably until she has a sip of Heineken and then.... Actually, just watch the thing. I don't think I had quite realised how beautifully observed it is, from the Sloane Ranger girl complete with Alice band and pearls to the tagline at the end: 'refreshes the parts wot other beers cannot reach.'

The advert plays on contemporary discourse about shifting standards of pronunciation in public life, the rise of mockney and estuary English. And it assumes a shared culture. Most people would have got that it's a parody of Pygmalion/My Fair Lady. But as a seven-year-old, I picked up none of this and still found it very funny. We used to repeat "the wat'ah in MaJorca, don't taste like wot it ough’a!" in the playground, much to the annoyance of the teachers. Beer adverts were part of popular culture in a way that is hard to imagine today.

Now compare it with an advert released by Heineken in 2018 called 'Open Your World'. It's almost unwatchably earnest. The premise is that people with different views should talk and we can all get along brilliantly, though naturally the conservative people are portrayed as creepy while the progressive ones are sunny and appealing.

One can imagine that the brief was to show how Heineken helps people with different views to get along and what the creatives came up with was…. people with different views, eventually, getting along. It's the advert equivalent of when Huey Lewis and the News' were asked to write a song for Back to the Future and came up with 'Back in Time' - though not half as much fun. One can imagine Don Draper throwing the boards across the meeting room at Peggy. It's sanctimonious and, most importantly, doesn't make you want a Heineken. You really need something stronger after watching it.

According to grizzled Northern adman Steve Harrison, author of Can't Sell, Won't Sell, the advertising world has largely forgotten that its primary purpose is to sell stuff.