Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere...

I heard today that a recent MacDonald's advert had been pulled after some people objected to it's content.  The commercial in question was the one with the boy asking his mother what his deceased father was like - inevitably, they end up in a branch of MacDonald's, where it is revealed that the one thing they had in common was a taste for fast food that tastes like cardboard.  The objection raised about this ad was that it was exploiting bereavement to sell burgers.  Well, obviously.  That's what advertising is about: exploiting our emotions to try and sell us essentially trivial products.  Personally, I found the sickly sentimentality it was trading in objectionable.  My dislike for other series of ads is less easily pinned down.  I detest, for instance, those Sainsburys 'food dancing' commercials.  In part, I think it is because they seem such a desperate attempt to create a 'trend' (note the hashtag they ran with the ads, in the hope that they could get #fooddancing trending on Twitter).  Moreover, the kind of people doing the 'dancing' in the ads, far from appearing to be ordinary supermarket customers of the kind I might relate to, just seemed like the kind of exhibitionists desperate to get on TV, that I generally run a mile to avoid.

But there are some commercials which, even over a distance in time of forty years, or so, still have a special place in my heart.  In particular, the Martini Bianco ads which played on British TV in the seventies.  These were incredibly glossy mini-movies with a catchy jingle, which aimed to show how, simply by drinking Martini, you could enjoy the international jet set lifestyle.  As I've noted elsewhere, as a young child, these seemed to represent the epitome of adult sophistication and believed that they were a reliable guide to how adult life would be: flying planes to rendezvous' on remote Caribbean islands with other beautiful people, or riding horses along a beach.  Of course, things haven't quite turned out like that, but I still have warm memories of the vision they created.  So, here's the Martini ad which, I feel, best encapsulated the dream they were selling:




Hell, I enjoyed that so much, here's another one: