Those Awful Advertising Slogans - No. 16 - Money Supermarket (again)

It's a quite a while since the last one in this series. I had begun to hope that better times were upon us. But no, once again we are confronted by a slogan that is simultaneously baffling, irritating and frankly rather nauseous. Not only that, but we have a repeat offender. They just didn't learn after my piece of some four years ago, although I note that they have parted company with their ad agency on that occasion, the pretentiously named "Mother" and gone for the slightly less pretentious but no less skin-crawling "Engine".

Yes, it is our old sparring partner Money Supermarket and this time they have clearly gone for the random name generator approach. You have three columns of words, words about finance and business in column 1, words denoting emotions in column 2 and various nouns of well-known things in column 3. Thus a spin of the dice might give us "Business Happy Clowns" or "Technology Wistful Petunias". What we got this time was "Money Calm Bull" and here is the cash-loving animal doing what all bulls love to do:

pic: Money Supermarket page on Facebook

A confession. Though the current campaign launched a few weeks back and there are ads on TV, some, no doubt, featuring our bovine friend and his trusty inflatable life-raft, I have failed to see any of them. I first became aware of the hitherto unknown link between cattle and valuable pieces of paper from posters recently put up around beautiful Ruislip (which thereby rendered it marginally less beautiful). I have no idea how the animal remains serene whilst maintaining a precarious balance amidst the shark-infested waters into which it seems to have drifted. Regular readers will not need me to add the inevitable "and I couldn't care less".

Fascinatingly, a browse for synonyms for the word "bull" produced many pages of fine examples but all on the lines of "hogwash", "twaddle", "double-talk" or "balderdash". How very satisfying. Money Calm Hogwash is an excellent slogan and I commend it to you whenever anything promoting Money Supermarket (and perhaps anything created by Engine) should cross your path.

As if the random name generator was not enough, those clever chaps at Engine added a cunning "Be like" to the slogan. Be like a bull. Enjoy a short life rampaging around meadows, servicing cows and scaring the life out of ramblers wearing red jumpers, then all the fun of a ride to the abattoir and some sharp knives. But calmly.

I think the sharks are the winners here. Sooner or later that bull is going into the water. There's not going to be a last-minute rescue because even if a ship should pass, our horned ruminant has no way of signalling its distress (anyway it will be too calm to do so). Either a large wave, a gust of wind or the slow leakage of air will do for it, and then it's definitely beef frenzy time with plenty of prime rib, t-bones and sirloin for all. Wealth Expectant Shark - there's a slogan to savour.

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