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

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

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

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