I once read that one psychological trait that creative advertising people exhibited universally was excessive and irrational optimism.
Well, touché, but when you get up every morning with the need to convince yourself, your coworkers and especially your clients that a few cute words and pictures you just thought up will electrify the populace, obliterate the wreckage left by decades of sloth, ignorance, mismanagement and wrong-thinking in the next few weeks and Make Everything Wonderful Again For Ever and Ever, a little irrational optimism could be just the ticket. Every adperson knows just how Moses would have felt up there on the mountain, waving to the seething rabble below, with an art bag full of client-approved tablets and a $10-million media buy breaking tomorrow.
Launching a new campaign is akin to sending a huge tsunami thundering toward an unsuspecting beach. All that power, all that energy, and surely the beach cannot resist, and will be blasted and cleansed and changed beyond recognition. But doggone it, you know, a year or two later, the damn thing looks just like it did before.
Eaton’s is a beach that’s seen more than its share of advertising ebb and flow. I helped in the creation of one particular tide, long ago, called Eaton’s Uncrates the Sun. It began as a series of quite unusual images and ideas and events that nobody had ever associated with a department store, and generated a power of excitement, marked, incidentally, by ferocious consumer spending at full price! (The words Second Christmas were whispered around the executive suite.)
Yet within three years, the concept commercials were chopped up into 10-second price-and-item snippets that were sold to suppliers! Imagine! This cordless hedge clipper for only 99 dollars! And the last Eaton’s spot I can actually recall involved a guy made up to be a large, bearded, undead Timothy Eaton, riding around the store on the escalators. Needless to say, it sucked. This was advertising the most unctuous board of directors on earth could only pretend to like.
Cut to last week, and I opened a newspaper to see a double-page spread signed Eaton’s. The left-hand page was blank, except for a tiny, unreadable but obviously verbose document. A line beneath said Our corporate mission statement. On the facing page was a wonderful, happy, sexy shot in full color of a great-looking girl with swinging blonde hair, crouched into a Chuck Berry duck-walk, playing air guitar. Her line read Our corporate mission statement. Then, in smaller type below, it said Revised. Wow, nice optimism!
Remember when Apple bought every ad page in Newsweek? Well Eaton’s has bought every ad in Toronto Life Fashion. Says their strat is to become all about fashion. The opening spread asks What if an entire store went into the change room? (A little sign on the change room door says Limit 62,738 items).
Page after page of good-lookin’ fashion shots follow, kids in clothes you can imagine the kids hanging around The Eaton Centre want to look like. Everything has a brand name, a brief description and a price, like they wanted you to go find it and buy it. And interestingly, what makes these ads different from Tommy’s and Calvin’s fashion ads in Vogue is that they have words in them (although not many), and the words say something cool or funny or odd and it helps. Lines like Funny, she doesn’t look like your mother. And Let the mood swings begin. And Life is short. Dress accordingly. And Rich or poor, happy or sad, a great hat is a great hat.
There’s television, too. Against a track of a woman singing Somebody peel me a grape a sophisticated lady nuzzles and teases a T-shirted hunk in her kitchen, then waves goodbye to the guy, who we now see is ankle-chained to the stove. Then the super Eaton’s. Times have changed. Yeah, they’re apologizing, but so nicely.
There are spots for a house label called Diversity. In each one, a very real kid appears, wearing the clothes, and does a piece. A girl sings a frilly song in German, then asks How was that? A dreadlocked kid from the projects does a mouth-music thing about brown bricks that’s right off the wall. Another kid tells how he had to come out of the closet and tell his mom he was straight. The sell line is Diversity @ Eaton’s. Whatever.
There’s some nice print with this too. Kids are paired in contrasting shots with contrasting lines like sinner?/saviour? poor?/rich? good?/evil? The answer’s always whatever. There’s nothing remarkable about visual attitude in fashion ads. It’s the addition of quips and quirks and ideas that makes you want to like this stuff a lot. And hope it may work. (Damn optimism again!)
Barry Base creates advertising campaigns for a living. He writes this column to promote the cause of what he calls intelligent advertising, and to attract clients who share the notion that many a truth is said in jest. Barry can be reached at (416) 924-5533, or faxed at (416) 960-5255, at the Toronto office of Barry Base & Partners.
