I don't get perfume commercials. The reason that I don't get perfume commercials has something to do with my love of commercials. Especially since the advent of "freeview" pseudo-cable in the UK, there really is nothing good on free-to-air television. Except the commercials. Certain of the advertising artists out there have truly mastered the art of the evocative. Bunnies lining their burrows for the John Lewis spring sale. Robins alighting over the crisp sheets waving in the wind, for the fabric softener you'll put on sheets that are never going to wave in the wind. An older couple smile goofily and disarmingly at one another over the picnic-bedecked bonnet of their car, in some mountains somewhere, for pensioners' car insurance for cars that never leave the garage. But you're there. In a second, you're in the mountains, you're feeling sheets dried in the breeze against your cheek, you're the Honda grooving in the carpark, you're the bunny whiffling its nose and you swear you smell just-mown hay. Wait. Did I say smell?
You'd think, wouldn't you, that this would make the matter of advertising a perfume, a smell, ferchrissakes, a walk in the park for these people. I mean, that's what smells do, right? They put one in mind of something. They conjure something. They evoke something.
Wait while I don my perfume-advertising-hack hat. Let me see ... I need to conjure something light, and floral. Tada! I conjure ... a chick in a clingy outfit with come-hither eyes! Genius! How about something darker, more patchouli-based? Don't blink. You'll miss it. Or, for your quel avant-garde unisex scents, a chick and a guy come-hithering together. Or really kick ass with lots of semi-naked chicks and guys!
I love fragrances. I'd buy twice as many if the advertisements worked with the associations that came with the smell instead of the ones that supposedly accompany the chick with the fan blowing her hair whom I'm supposed to want to be like. But hey. It's Christmas. And it could be worse.
2 comments:
It's all true, and I don't get it either. I'm not a perfume buyer so I double don't get it. Ads are infuriating aren't they! If I'm at a beer-involved party, nobody looks like the people in the commercials. Nobody!
(Great blog!)
Heidi, you said it. Sometimes I wonder where those parties that they show in the advertising are happening. (Hey! Those two chicks are apparently having sex on the sofa! And that guy is drinking an alcoholic soda! Alternative universe). But then I realise that if I was actually at one of them, I'd have to kill myself. (And thanks!)
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