I watched the fabulous Life on Mars last night; it really has to be the best and most entertaining drama on TV at the moment. This week I nearly fell off my chair when I saw my favourite children's TV programme of all time lampooned in a drug-enhanced hallucinogenic experience featuring DCI Gene Hunt, as citizen of Camberwick Green, beating up a nonce. But that wasn't the only high point in the programme, the series has also been notable for the accuracy of it's depiction of the 1970s, right down to the products that were popular.
As you know from previous posts, I'm a fan of advertising, particularly the psychology; so I was delighted last night to see, on the office shelf of Gene Hunt, a bottle of the classic male fragrance Hai Karate. What tickled me was the memory of the advertisements, not just for Hai Karate, but for Denim - the other classic fragrance - both guaranteeing sexual conquest to the man wearing the fragrance. And there we have the great advertising truth: no matter how slick or technologically adept we have become at producing advertising material, the ad-men still appeal to those basest instincts, pushing the buttons deep inside us that we don't always know are there.
Sex, as it always has done, sells. Consequently the bedroom shelves of my testosterone driven sons and their mates contain Lynx. Equally I know that by adding the label 'sex' into this post I will receive far more hits than normal - sorry if you've come here under false pretences.
2 comments:
I never heard a voice in an advert deeper than the one for 'Denim'!
Weren't we sophisticates in those days, though, when we splashed on our 'Brut 33' before strutting our stuff in the school disco (always, for some unfathomable reason, held on an afternoon in the school hall, with the curtains closed? As we emerged, linking into the sunlight when it finished at 5pm, maybe it was our equivalent of leaving a club as the early morning sun rose?
Thanks for a Proustian moment, Crofty!
THJnr
Why wash. It looks good.
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