Sunday, February 25, 2007

The Power of Advertising

I had a very exciting day yesterday which involved going round to my parents’ house to shampoo their carpets and then going to the library in the hope of finding various books to ease the pain of the one that I finished earlier in the week. I found various books that I wanted to read so hopefully the pain will be eased soon.

Today I am going back over to my parents’ house as it is my sister’s birthday during the week and so she is going over there for lunch today. I ordered her present from Amazon and despite using the supersaver option, it turned up a couple of days later, which I thought was really impressive. I wasn’t home so one of my neighbours took it. I didn’t go round and pick it up from them straight away and so the next night there was a really loud knocking on my door and my neighbour’s three year old son was standing there in his superman vest with the package in his hand. My neighbour said her son had been desperate to bring it round and so had been a bit too enthusiastic knocking on the door.

I shall now prove the power of advertising. I really like the song ‘You’re lovely to me’ by Lucky Jim, which is purely through having heard it on the Kingsmill advert. Every time I heard that advert I looked up from whatever I was doing, so I figured I should track it down. You can listen to it in full here.

Being an old softy at heart, I also really like the recent Bisto adverts. Let me tell you whilst there may always have been gravy with Sunday lunch when I was still living at home, it was always a miserable experience (not the gravy, the sitting down to eat with the rest of my family). But I rather like the sentiment of people wanting to make the effort to spend ‘quality time’ with their family. Gravy is always good anyway.



When I was looking for that advert, I also came across an utterly appalling advert for Bisto from the 1980s. It brought the memories flooding back, but I have to say that I am glad advertising has moved on

2 comments:

steve said...

I think some of the adds from years gone by were so charming and because of that we took notice, It would be interesting if a company was brave enough to run a series of older adds today

They would get so much free press from it would be cool something like bisto or tide

Random Reflections said...

There are some adverts that instantly bring memories flooding back and that I'd like to see again, but there were also some truly dreadful ones. They were often more innocent though and I wonder whether people will look back with fond memories to the adverts of today. There might be a few but probably not all that many.