Our gardeners also keep things neatly trimmed. Of course, that'd be Jose, Arnulfo and Jesus, and "things" would mean their mustaches.
America used to be to advertising what Indonesia is to nutmeg and San Pedro de Macoris is to shortstops.
Then we got fat, happy, and conservative.
Sure, the ad agencies of few other nations can match America’s technical expertise: we’ve got the highest-resolution cameras, the trickiest Flash programmers, we even invented the tri-vision billboard. But where the form flourished, the content withers.
Earnest car manufacturer spots, kid-friendly fast food spots, we’ve got every possible subcategory of inoffensiveness taken care of. In America, the most recent and memorable example of a sexually suggestive (not ribald, just suggestive) national spot with a double entendre is Herbal Essences’ “A Totally Organic Experience”, which is at least a decade old and plays on a facile similarity between a couple of unrelated adjectives.
The United Kingdom might be lacking for some things we take for granted (refrigeration, fluoride, digestible food), but the Limeys do know how to appreciate a brilliant TV spot.
This spot was created by the New York office of J. Walter Thompson. If you’re the kind of sexually repressed uptight person who loves to find offense in every crevice, inhale and hold it for a second. It’s worth mentioning that the first names of the executive creative director, creative director, art director, copywriter, senior agency producer and executive producer for this spot are Sarah, Lisa, Megan, Margie, Kirsten and Melissa respectively.
Granted, maybe it’d be tougher for a creative team full of guys to put together such a concept without the suits or the clients thinking of them as lecherous and disgusting. Or if you want to be really cynical, you could believe that only men could come up with something like this, and used Sarah, Lisa et al. to front the operation and give it a sheen of credibility. (See Capote, Truman and Lee, Harper.)
Admittedly, for the first 16 seconds the spot looks like it’s just generically misogynistic – women doing yard work in clothes not suited to the purpose (and even better, enjoying it.)
It was the incongruous word “bushes,” not common in TV spots and in this case delivered literally with a wink, that caused this viewer’s ears to perk up.
Yes, the black chick just happens to get the line about really big bushes, and the Oriental* chick sings about mighty small gardens. So if you want to find the spot racist, in addition to being sexist, you have that to enjoy too.
On the other hand, if you’re a logophile, this is perhaps the only spot in existence that includes both the words “topiary” and “Aphrodite”. Maybe having the redheaded girl stroking a cat, twice, is a little much, but that’s just…
wait for it…
Splitting hairs!
But most importantly, the spot tells a story. There’s a narrative – or more accurately, a libretto. The spot actually goes somewhere. Setup, exposition, payoff, ID. With laughs throughout, and vocals so busy that they require repeated listenings.
You can argue that the spot might be a little juvenile, to the extent that no sexual humor is highbrow. At least not since Geoffrey Chaucer, and that’s only because he lived 650 years ago and thus meets the definition of classic by attrition.
Does the spot resonate? Is it clever? Does it illustrate the benefit of the product? Boy, does it ever. Plus it doesn’t obscure the name of the advertiser. Wilkinson even resisted the temptation to insist on placing the company name somewhere in the song, preferably in the first line.
What’s a sexually suggestive word that rhymes with “Schick”?
No one’s going to confuse this with a competitor’s razors. And perhaps Schick Quattro enjoys a different brand identity in the Mother Country than it does here. Well, it does now.
What’s frustrating is that clearly there are plenty of American agencies capable of doing comparable work. What there aren’t are advertisers willing to buy off on a spot like this. Then of course, there’s also the leviathan matter of an endlessly intrusive Federal Communications Commission: a government agency that operates with neither checks nor balances, and that FIVE YEARS LATER is STILL looking for parties to punish after tens of millions of impressionable American youth were subjected to a split second’s exposure to Janet Jackson’s decorated nipple. Some of those children are now adolescents and young adults, and a few of them have certainly adopted violent crime and living off the avails of prostitution as lifestyle choices. May God have mercy on Justin Timberlake’s soul.
*Some hypersensitive people like to feel self-important and point out that “Oriental” is somehow offensive and obsolete, and that the preferred term is now “Asian”. Considering that Iraqis, Israelis and Sri Lankans are all Asian, the term isn’t all that descriptive.
