eBay women

A poster using this picture is all over the underground at present. We were walking past it with a female friend the other day who opined that she thought it was "the dykeiest picture in London". Interestingly we have had had similar thoughts. It's definitely the presence of the woman on the left that does it, perhaps because she reminds us, somewhat, of Gina Gershon in Bound (1996).  They are not models, anyway, but New York-based "fashion bloggers and stylists" Anda and Masha.  Nice to see advertisers using real people instead of models.

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A healthy Olympics

Here's something which you wouldn't see these days; those patriotic chaps at peddlers of death, Rothmans, donating money to Britain's athletes for the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Forty years later, of course, we wouldn't contemplate such a thing. The Olympics are about fitness, health and looking after your body. Wait a minute, isn't the official restaurant of the Olympic site...McDonald's?

Plus ça change, as our little Froggy chums would say...

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Bentley Mulsanne Turbo

This, for Triple P, is the most evocative motor car advertisement of recent times.  The brilliantly retro production for the Bentley Mulsanne Turbo; Bentley's successful attempt to redefine the marque as a sporting alternative to the rather staid Rolls-Royce.  It was named after the Mulsanne straight on the Circuit de la Sarthe at Le Mans where Bentleys won four consecutive victories from 1927-1930.  Bentley was bought by Rolls-Royce in 1931 and for many years Bentleys and Rolls-Royce cars had been identical except for different radiator grills.  The new car, whilst looking identical had an engine boosted by a Garrett AiResearch turbocharger which could power it along at a very un-Rolls-Royce-like 135mph.  Mainly aimed at the UK market as emissions regulations elsewhere would have made it illegal, Bentley underestimated the demand.  Aiming at producing 100 a year they eventually had to increase production to 200 a year and newly delivered cars were selling at £120,000, which was twice the list price.

Cover art for the German edition of Role of Honour.  The artist has struggled with rendering the Mulsanne's distinctive radiator

Its coolness was cemented when it appeared in two James Bond novels written by John Gardner: Role of Honour (1984) and Nobody Lives Forever (1986).  We always thought it made a better literary successor to the original  Bentley 4 1/2 litre from Fleming's books than any number of Aston Martins.

The styling of the advertisement harks back to the glory days of racing Bentleys in the twenties and thirties and the reference to the "silent sports car" is to the old advertisements for the car.  Around ten years after the Mulsanne Turbo was introduced we were driven down to the South of France in its successor, the Turbo R.  It made the twelve hour trip seem effortless but used up an enormous amount of fuel!

The Mulsanne Turbo re-established Bentley as a more sporting marque and paved the way for the current footballers' favourite the Bentley Continental.

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Figleaves Girls cause a very small rumpus

The London Underground is much enlivened at present by this splendid poster for the Figleaves online lingerie store.  However, just three weeks ago the Advertising Standards Authority had to adjudicate complaints about the previous poster which decorated Tube stations around Christmas time.

This picture of a buxom young lady in stockings and killer stilettos had three people complaining that they found the advert offensive and two people thought the poster was unsuitable to display in places where children might see them.  Fortunately, CBS, who placed the posters, had already got clearance that they were within the advert Code, provided that they were not displayed within 100 metres of a school.  Fortunately, the ASA noted that the posters were to advertise lingerie and that it was quite reasonable for them to feature a model in lingerie.  The ASA ruled that the posters were not likely to cause widespread offence.

We should think not!  What sort of person would complain about such images?  Even more shocking is that the advertising code has a rule about certain images not being shown within 100 metres of a school.  Do schoolchildren not have mothers who wear lingerie?  Will seeing women in lingerie damage their delicate sensibilities?  This is insane and seems to be part of the pernicious drive in the UK for anything that could be taken as vaguely sexual to be banned on the basis of its perceived effect on children.  If children habitually see people in underwear they will just take it as normal (the same applies to naked bodies) as they know no different.  If people tell them that seeing people in underwear or without clothes is "rude", "dirty" or bad then they will believe that.  Advertisements featuring topless women are common in Europe, both in posters on the street and on TV commercials. Are the children in these (many of them Catholic) countries more traumatised than ours?  Of course not.  We are afraid that these moves are largely driven by notions of appeasement to those from minority (and alien) religious groups.

It is the same political correctness that has caused the governing body of beach volleyball to authorise long shorts and tee shirts for this summer's Olympics (much to the disappointment of the dozens of MPs who signed up for priority tickets, heh, heh!).

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Special K girl Merissa Porter

Special K, the girls low-calorie breakfast cereal, that looks and tastes just like cattle feed, are running one of their post Christmas blowout campaigns at present.  Daring women to wear red (for some unfathomable reason that obviously makes sense to advertising people) their TV, internet and print ads feature the really rather delectable model, Merissa Porter.

27 year old Merissa hails from Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, although more recently she has been living in Surbiton just a few stations up the mainline from where triple P lives.

Other than the lovely Merissa, Biggleswade is famous for being the birthplace of music hall producer and performer Charles Penrose (1873-1952), whose really rather sinister 1922 song The Laughing Policeman used to give Triple P nightmares when he was little.

Talking of music, guitar playing Merissa was in a singing group a few years ago called Mr Skillz and the Crazy Girls (above, second from right) but they only seem to have only released one single, in 2007.

Oddly, given the low calorie nature of Special K, Biggleswade is also the home to decidedly high calorie breakfast cereal Jordans Original Crunchy.  Originally bringing the alien concept of granola to the UK in the early seventies, Jordans sells itself on a healthy image despite many of its cereals, such as Jordans Original Crunchy, containing bucketloads of sugar (28% for raisins and almonds version) and saturated fat.

It's also ironic that a girl whose first job at the age of sixteen was in Pizza Town in Biggleswade is fronting a campaign aimed at slimmers.

Merissa's own 34-24-34 figure looks like it needs very little help from Special K!

Splendid!

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Ocado Periodic Table advert

We aren't often impressed by advertisements on the Underground but the Ocado "periodic table" one at Oxford Circus at present is utterly brilliant.  The tagline is: Ocado: groceries for every table.

Put together for the annual CBS competion to produce advertisements with more text on them than normal, it made the final shortlist of six from nearly 500 entries.  Even more impressive was the fact that it was produced by Ocado's in house team, not a top advertisng agency.

Ocado handle on-line food ordering and delivery for the Waitrose supermarket chain and their idea of relating things you can get in the supermarket to an imagined periodic table was a stroke of true genius.  Amazingly they didn't win, but they should have and they were voted the passengers' favourite. 

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Playboy Energy Drink?

Kelly launches the Playboy Energy Drink in London on November 18th last year.

Agent Triple P was wandering through the City on Friday and saw a bus carrying an advertisement for Playboy Energy Drink.  We had never heard of such a thing but, apparently, it is available in twenty countries and was launched in the UK two months ago (using Kelly Brook, naturally).

The lovely Kelly has also posed tastefully on a motorcycle (a Harley-Davidson soft tail if we are not mistaken - our particular friend S in Vancouver has one) to advertise this product.  Kelly also features on the UK drink's website which features some particularly disgusting sounding cocktail recipes.

Agent Triple P does not understand the purpose of energy drinks.  Why would anyone want to pay a premium price for a sugary drink full of sugar and stimulants?  Why not just have a coffee with sugar in it?  Why does anyone need a drink at all?  If you need a glucose boost have a chocolate bar.  It will still bring you crashing down shortly afterwards as your body floods your system with insulin.

Apparently, the Playboy concoction (which has all sorts of nonsensical ingredients like Ginseng Root, Guarana extract and Damiana leaf in it, to justify the high price) tastes like...well a sugary, orange fizzy drink.

Sorry Kelly, you can't look sophisticated if you're holding a can

"This product provides consumers with a taste of the exhilaration that has long been associated with the Playboy lifestyle". 

Or so says Sarah Haney, senior vice president, global licensing, Playboy Enterprises, Inc.  I'm sorry but sophisticated drinkers do not  drink any sort of carbonated drinks other than water, full stop.  Sugary, carbonated drinks are for children.

Imagine how much one this size would cost. That's the drink, by the way.

On top of this it's priced at £1.20 for 250ml.  So, about the same as a cheap bottle of wine.  San Pellegrino, Agent Triple P's favourite carbonated water, is only 33p per 250ml and that's an expensive mineral water. 

Now while we are pleased to see Kelly continuing to pick up cheques from Playboy this really sums up what someone once called the worst managed top brand in history.  You have an iconic logo, global recognition of your name and yet you continue to plough investment into down market tat.  The inference, presumably, is that if you drink the drink it will enable you to perform like Mr Hefner and bag a Kelly (not that we are saying he has but she has certainly impressed someone at Playboy).  But surely even the sort of stupid young people who, presumably, drink these drinks don't think that.  Do they?

The key with building a premium brand is to only associate it with premium products not just stick your label on anything that anyone offers you.  What next?  Playboy pizza, Playboy tortilla chips?  Utter nonsense!  The sad fact of the matter is that, considering it used to be a magazine that did have an up market position and a defined view of what was sophisticated (albeit fifty years ago), we suspect that no-one at Playboy would recognise "sophisticated" if it jumped out of a cake at them

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A really annoying advertisement!

For some reason advertisements (or "commercials" as only people in the industry call them) on radio are much more annoying than when they are on TV.  Possibly because they are disassociated from any possibly redeeming visuals but mostly, we suspect, the reason is that there seem to be a lot less adverts on radio at any one point in time compared with TV.  The other issue is that, because of the nature of the medium, they tend to be information heavy.  You can't just show some nice footage of the product accompanied by music.  No, you have to suffer the thing that makes Agent Triple P hate radio so much; people talking at you.

Classic FM always seems to be cursed with a particularly annoying set of adverts and always drawn from a very small selection so that you get the same advert over and over again.  Some of them are so annoying we actually have to turn the radio off. 

Oi, Gary, stop polluting our airwaves with your smarmy oleaginous tones, you soporific, self-satisfied sounding American!

Most annoying at present is one of those Honda adds featuring the lugubrious voice of Garrison (real name Gary) Keillor.  Why is it that a Japanese firm selling in Britain feels that it is appropriate to use an American voice?  Is it because they are trying to sound less Japanese?  

British actor Simon Day must have got just as sick of Andy Williams as Agent triple P whilst making this advert

Anyway we would never buy anything made by Honda as a result; particularly as they were responsible for the really annoying "Impossible dream" TV advert featuring Agent Triple P's least favourite singer Andy fucking Williams!   Christmas is approaching and with it the terrifying prospect of "It's the most wonderful time of the year" playing everywhere again.  Fortunately Agent Triple P's planned visit to Canada (this particular song is far more popular in North Amrica) before Christmas has had to be postponed on account of the fact that we have to go to Africa instead.  Hopefully they will not have Andy Williams in Africa.

While we are on the subject of Classic FM another really annoying thing at present is their announcer who gives the frequency details.  It's the way he pronounces "digital" that annoys Triple P.   "Blah blah blah and on digital radio".  Now everyone Triple P knows pronounces this word "digi-tul" (with the third syllable rhyming with "bull" ) and the second vowel hardly being pronounced at all; as if written "digitle".  This ghastly fellow pronounces it "digi-tal" (third syllable rhyming with "shall") with far more emphasis on the third syllable.  Yes we know that the word is spelt "digital" but is still drives us mad!

Grr!

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