Apple iPad

Here some warm subjective camera shots of idealised Apple iPad users according to Apple. Or something like the following proposition:

'Are you a (cultured and well-informed) reader of The Economist, a (cool and up-to-date) Twitter user, a (savvy and enlightened) follower of TED talks and a (maybe nostalgic) friend of books? Are you (do you like to think of yourself as) all or either of the above?
Then you, who enjoy being all these things while sitting leisurely at home or at a trendy and generic café with sofas, wearing brand-new casual clothes, with your nicely air-brushed skin tone…, you must be an iPad person (buyer)'.

By the way, the ads bring an illustrative take on our contemporary cultural landscape, again, according to Apple: the titles of books we like to read (or just buy), e.g. Nineteen Eighty Four (now that’s a surprise); the people we like to listen to, e.g. Jamie Oliver (still?); the issues that we are concerned about (or supposed to be), e.g. climate change; the nothingness we like to spread via Twitter, e.g. a classic: “Just ate the best sandwich. Ever” (!).

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Apple: iPad
Euston Station (LU)
London

I am the rules

A year ago it was “the revolution of you”. Now we’ve moved to a first-person narrative with “I am the rules”. Either way, “you” and “I” are, of course, no other than constructed characters by the authors of these stories, i.e. the advertisers.
In this sense, what strikes me the most about this type of advertising discourse is how perilously blurred the distinction between fiction and reality has become; how by sheer repetition, over-exposure, and persuasive enchantments, the audiences of these advertising messages might end up ‘forgetting’ that those “you” and “I” are not really themselves.

Remember there was a time when marketing was mainly about the marketed product? Nike, for example, are experts at having moved on from that stage. Certainly, they still sell actual shoes (or sportswear in general), but what they effectively market is attitude, values and identity. I’d struggle if I had to explain this to my grandfather; yet, I’m in wonder that this fact has become so incontrovertible these days.

Most perverted of all is the appearance today that power has been given to the citizens, now christened as the new agents of capitalism. But this, it seems to me, is rather the product of a narrative device, a story that it’s being told by a narrator’s voice which has made its way inside of us; a voice saying stuff like for instance “I am the rules”; a first-person narrative voice which we risk taking for our own.

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Nike / Foot Locker: I am the rules
Euston Station (LU)
London

Open happiness

Old charm, nostalgia…, it’s cola Christmas, tis the season to celebrate and to go shopping for presents, although unfortunately, as the 'little girl who has become a woman' in the ad does, you might have to carry them all around awkwardly in your hand (carrier bags don’t look so cool). But it’s okay, in spite of that and of the overwhelming crowds in Oxford Street, you are still in the mood to smile and make your rosy cheeks glow at the chance encounter with cola Santa; and lucky you, you still have a free hand to grab his nicely shaped cola bottle (Freudian connotations at work).

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Coca-cola: Open happiness
Lascotts Road, N22
London

Sometimes you need some extra cash...

If you frown upon the idea of our public space being sold to advertising, you’ll surely find this utterly disagreeable:
In times when the lack of regulation of the financial sector has arguably been the major catalyst of a global economic crisis which in turn has driven dramatic funding cuts in our public sector (education, health, welfare, local councils, etc.), it is precisely a high-interest loans company who sponsors London’s usual free-travel night on New Year’s Eve this year.
Transport for London and the Mayor of London must have agreed that there is nothing wrong with this.

This is London, I think containing a sigh, a city that sells its soul to the best bid.

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Wonga.com: Sometimes you need some extra cash...
Wood Green Station (LU)
London

The Beatles. Now on iTunes

That’s the IMAX cinema viewed from my office window these days. Any time I dare look out, I find myself watched over by those four frozen gigantic icons; a rather unsettling feeling, I must admit.

Unsettling also that the IMAX cinema (part of the British Film Institute (BFI), a public cultural institution) is increasingly using its billboard space not to advertise currently screening film, but to generate income from hiring it out to external parties: there we’ve now got the Beatles courtesy of Apple iTunes, but from my memory I retrieve, among many film-unrelated products, cars, clothing brands, ice-creams and chocolate bars blown up to the impressive scale the IMAX offers.

The BFI charges £120,000/fortnight for the IMAX 360 degrees façade to interested advertising parties (as gathered from a colleague of mine who recently made an enquiry to place an advertisement there). Without knowing much about the BFI’s finances, I can only guess that renting out that space must be the BFI’s most profitable line of business. Of course, as a public institution whose funding has particularly been cut recently (what not?), it’s difficult to reproach the BFI for seeking the extra income. Thus, I’ll reproach the Establishment instead for insidiously stepping up the shift from the public to the private, leaving the balance between freedom and equality in the hands of the market, demoting citizens into consumers and, as I see it, for renouncing the aim of solidarity in favour of individual profit.

The Beatles appropriated by Apple, public culture appropriated by the logic of the free market…, and me not being able to do much more than just avoiding my office window these days. I never thought that we were so close to do the right thing, but I can see that we are now in fact getting further. Rather unsettling, I said.

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Apple iTunes: The Beatles. Now on iTunes
BFI IMAX Cinema, Waterloo
London

We are London. Are you?

Just the tip of the iceberg of this multimedia 'We are London' campaign.

Quite a branding stretch here for German sporting-cum-fashion goods makers Adidas, carrying out a completely localised campaign in London, closely targeting the homeboys they hope to convert/keep loyal to the spell of their global brand.

Appealing to that something so reassuring as it's the sense of belonging, addressing the audience with a direct question -"Are you?"-, the advertisers have taken this campaign to Facebook and YouTube. Just follow the link in the poster if you are curious -you'll learn that the kid in the above poster is grime MC Maxsta from East Ham, one among several success stories of local kids from non-postcard London areas who have done well in the hip-hop scene and have agreed to tell us all about it while touring us around their 'hoods' wearing Adidas clothes.

I have to believe that this grim London / hip-hop scene / social media stuff gotta be the cool thing, but I'm afraid I'm just too old to know. It's not that I'm not a Londoner, you know what I'm sayin'?

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Adidas: We are London. Are you?
Euston Station (LU)
London

We don't do this. So we can afford to do this

Something that particularly struck me when I first observed advertising in Britain was how much it played with the 'cheeky'.

Cheeky as it is, the ad above also presents an interesting self-referential function of the advertising language, acknowledging a significant competence on the part of the public in understanding the way advertising works.

Here the advertisers take advantage of the great appeal that Formula 1 has nowadays without spending a penny in massive sponsoring accounts: the picture of the car gets our attention, even ignites our desire.

Then, they seem to be telling us how because they don't spend huge amounts in that shallow thing which is sponsoring a Formula 1 team, they can give us a better deal on their mobile communications product.

Also, by letting us find the obvious conclusion to their proposed cheeky syllogism, they allow us to feel a bit clever and a bit complicit, a basic tactic for seduction.

All to tell us that basically they'd give us back a 3% of our expenditure on their mobile services, an amount to be spent only on Tesco or affiliated partners, if we decided to let ourselves be enticed by their offer.

So this is what they do.

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Tesco Mobile: We don't do this. So we can afford to do this.
Lascotts Road, N22
London

Be younique

The copy reads: "Andrea Garbolino. Contest Hero. Turin. Be younique".
The story, I read at the Police dedicated webpage, is that a contest was organised to find the advertisement face for 2010. The participants, supposedly fans of Police accesories, had to submit pictures of themselves and their 'youniqueness'. And it was this chap who got it in the end. So it is a 'you' who makes the brand identity here -or something like that, you know.

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Police: Be younique
Leicester Square Station

"There is more to life than increasing its speed"

This poster is part of a wider project called ‘What is the city but the people?’ undertaken by Art on the Underground, the official arts program of London Underground, whose aim is to engage with the public by presenting contemporary art in the Tube.

The project ‘What is the city but the people?’ gravitated on a booklet of the same title compiling famous quotes; the title itself being a line from a Shakespearean tragedy.
The booklet was passed on to train drivers for them to read to customers through the trains’ PA system. The point being, I guess, to raise a smile and even some philosophical questions among the Tube’s passengers.

Pleasant as it is to be greeted by the Mahatma’s wisdom and encouraged to smile –and maybe to think too– for a purpose different of buying, the Tube’s sponsored art initiatives are inescapably that: sponsored. Thus, to some extent they are subject to London Underground’s agendas and will always work to create a positive view of the Tube amongst its customers; lo, the cause of marketing.

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Art on the Underground: "There is more to life than increasing its speed"
Wood Green Underground Station

سلام שלום Peace

 

Quite a statement these days to show the word ‘Peace’ together in Arabic, Hebrew and English.
And of course, quite a good branding move by the Quakers, coming across as uncomplicated (no obscure language, no reference to any particular cosmology), altruistic (devoted to a universal interest), acquiescent (encompassing plurality, accommodating for the different backgrounds and nuances of the multicultural global society) and down-to-earth (addressing the current faith-related divide and conflict between, broadly speaking, Muslims, Jews and Christians).
Moreover, in the midst of the usual hustle and bustle of Euston Road, indeed uplifting is to encounter the simplicity of the message: peace.

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The Quakers: سلام שלום Peace
Friends House
173 Euston Road
London NW1

Cool Japan. Fusion with tradition

Same campaign as on the previous year [see 2009 related post], but the so typical geishas are now replaced by the also typical Shibuya crossing in Tokyo, a distinctive landmark of the imagined Japanese cityscape, as fair a representation of real Tokyo –and by extension of Japan too– as Piccadilly Circus is of London and Britain and Times Square of New York City and the USA, this is, not really a fair representation at all.
However, most often this ‘fairness’ does not concern tourism much: tourism seems to be less about truth than about fantasy; more about dreams than about being awake. One could say that ordinary people have plenty of truth in their usual lives (although this is of course very debatable), so when they ‘dress’ as tourists they rather do it in pursue of fantasy, not truth. Maybe too broad a simplification and a generalisation, I admit, but I think the point is made. Fantasy can be packaged and sold in commercial denominations; truth is just a trickier thing, not what one’s most likely to find in the realm of advertising.

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JNTO: Cool Japan. Fusion with tradition
Leicester Square Station (LU)
London

Come on show me your cocoa beam

I confess that for some time I enjoyed looking at this ad. Maybe it was what seemed to me an unselfconscious style, a refreshingly naive and warm-hearted quality, a feel-good element.

But then I started to wonder, and so I paused my enjoyment, that maybe I was being a little bit of a victim of my own exotic gaze, that there was something a bit patronising about the ad, or at least a reasonable suspicion of being patronising.

Although not strikingly obvious, the ad is actually an ad within an ad, seemingly a picture of a roadside advertisement painted on a wall somewhere - one imagines - in Ghana, since it is there where Cadbury claims their cocoa beans are from.
So an "unselfconscious", "naive" and "warm-hearted" Ghanaian piece of advertising - an 'authentic', an 'original' - has been basically pasted on to the billboard spaces of the grey, cynical and decadent Britain, where a bit of Fairtrade chocolate will surely bring some comfort for the soul (and for the sugar-addicted metabolisms), and the joy of life of the wise African peoples will definitely do us good.

Well, am I being too ill-thinking to see a bit of the condescending myth of the noble savage there?

How not to get in a bad mood when being awaken from a sweet dream? And sweet is the Orientalist dream, I'm afraid, even more if it's Fairtrade.

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Cadbury Fairtrade: Come on show me your cocoa beam
Finsbury Park Underground Station
London

Walk Oman. The soul of Arabia

How likely would one be to find the soul of Europe by visiting the Alps?
How likely is tourism to deliver us souls of any sort?
Why might we want to chase souls in any case?

By pressing the button of the exotic spell, I know the ad probably gets what it aims to. But come on, this is the 21st century already: "The soul of Arabia"!? What's that?

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Oman Air: Walk Oman. The soul of Arabia
Russell Square Station
London

Be the revolution of you

There you go. This is branding today. Not about what the brand does for you, what it says about you or what you share with the brand; the brand, my friend, is you (or seemingly so they'd like you to think).

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Nike: Be the revolution of you
Waterloo Station

Holidays are coming

Well..., Coca-cola, the no. 1 global brand. So what is in this ad? Self-reference to previous and wider campaigns (TV); the substitution of the not so all-inclusive word ‘Christmas’ by the more politically correct ‘holidays’; the iconic simplicity and cosy familiarity of the glass bottle; the Americana of the eighteen wheeler truck; the hijacking of Santa Claus; and more subjectively, the rather unsettling dark undertones of the image, that half-night setting, the truck with its headlights on, rather menacing reminding me of that evil beast of Spielberg’s “Duel”, which in its Spanish version was more explicitly titled “El Diablo sobre Ruedas” (“The Devil on Wheels”)…, yes, holidays are coming, Coca-cola is coming…

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Coca-cola: Holidays are coming
Stamford Street, SE1
1 Dec 2009

Premium Down

This is just one of the corridors of Oxford Circus station flooded with Uniqlo advertising.
What interests me of Uniqlo is how they play with their Japanese identity, not just in the ad above, where 'Japaneseness' is somewhat subtly implied by the logo in katakana writing (ユニクロ) and the Asian model, but in general in the stores, web and all public image.

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Uniqlo: Premium Down
Oxford Circus Station (LU)
London

We believe nothing should get in the way of...

Shameless apologia of consumerism.
But I still like John Lewis.

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John Lewis: We believe nothing should get in the way of...
Leicester Square Station (LU)
London

Jimmy Bedford 1940-2009

Who would have said that an obituary could become a piece of advertising?

The text is hard to read from my photo, so I've transcribed it below for the convenience of the probably inexistent dedicated reader of my captions:

"When you step into a job at the Jack Daniel Distillery that was once held by Mr. Jack himself, you've obviously got a lot to live up to. Jimmy Bedford met that challenge during his 20 years as only our sixth Master Distiller since 1886. When he passed away this August, we lost not only a respected colleague and dedicated whiskey maker, most importantly, we lost a dear friend."

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Jack Daniel's: Jimmy Bedford 1940-2009
Waterloo Station (LU)
London

Value for Ideas

Spanish bank Santander bought British bank Abbey in 2004, but not until now they had dared changing the name to Santander, just their flame-like logo had started featuring along with the Abbey name.

The ad in the picture is basically a corporate public notice, only that the implications of the re-branding process are so huge, they have to do a proper advertising campaign to lubricate public understanding and acceptance.

The whole branding issue is really interesting in this case when bringing into play the fact that Santander was sponsoring British F1 team McLaren (Lewis Hamilton) up until now, what fit nicely in their UK campaigns. However, from 2010, Santander will sponsor McLaren's eternal rival Ferrari (Fernando Alonso), a difficult move to capitalise in UK branding campaigns. Bad timing for Santander UK.

More info: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8069648.stm

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Santander: Value for Ideas
Upper St, N12
London

Cool Japan. Fusion with tradition

The Japan National Tourism Organization, the Japanese governmental institution behind this ad, knows well how much geishas are liked over here, that’s why it’s geishas they give us.

How many tourist brochures, articles in travel magazines, guidebooks on Japan, covers of Japanese novels, souvenirs, etc., feature images of geishas! And yet, how few actual geishas will average Japanese people ever encounter in their lives these days.
But, hey, geishas are a well-established symbol, widespread, recognisable and unmistakeable; in many readers’ minds ‘geisha’ (or maiko, or for that matter any girl dressed in a fancy kimono) = Japan; quite a temptation for advertisers. At the same time, it is worth noting that the symbol ‘geisha’ renders a particularly exotic, erotic and feminising representation of its object, i.e. Japan, with all the discursive implications involved in such process (on which I won’t go about here).

This said, these geisha girls in the picture do not seem very serious geishas to me; one could think they might actually be just posing as geishas, playing at being geishas, phoney geishas; they are geishas with a twist. And I reckon such twist must be close to what this “cool Japan” brand is all about. “Fusion with tradition”, they say. Rather, I’d say, a re-invention of that tradition; recycling with a marketing agenda; ‘tradition’ reshaped to fit around the commodity mould.

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JNTO: Cool Japan. Fusion with tradition
Waterloo Station (LU)
London