Those awful advertising slogans - 1. Oris

I used to write a series concerning advertising on the tube devoted to deconstructing the underlying meanings behind the jarring slogans and images that faced us at stations or on the trains. Now that I commute hardly at all it seems fitting to put magazine ads under the spotlight, notably those featured in the weekend colour magazine that accompanies my Saturday newspaper.

Today’s subject is a watch. But not any old timekeeper. This is the Oris Big Crown ProPilot Altimeter. It is worthy of study because

• it features an altimeter
• Anyone can buy one, not just royalty with large heads
• The slogan is “Real watches for Real People”.

And it will set you back a mere £2,350 or so (Naturally this price is not displayed on the advert but yes, I bothered to check because I know you’d want to know and that’s the level of investigative journalism we go to on Ramblings). Now I can see that some particular users – mountaineers, scientists, balloonists and the like – could find it helpful. You may feel that this is a sensibly priced product suitable for those occasions when you simply must know how high you are (“Darling we’ve been invited to the Harrisons for dinner”. “Oh, no, they live at 200’ and you know that always brings on my nose bleeds”). But I’m not convinced that pilots would have this one on their Christmas letter to Santa. If you fly an aircraft with instruments, which you will if you are a professional pilot and therefore one at whom this watch is ostensibly aimed, then one of them will be an altimeter. It is essential. You don’t, from time to time, remove your arm from the joystick to inspect your wrist so that you can murmur to your co-pilot “We seem to be at 48,000, let’s take her down a bit”. You look at your CAA certified instrument panel.

But you will have guessed that the real target of today’s little packet of invective is the slogan. Naturally, we can examine its meaning by considering how else it might have been phrased.

• Fake Watches for Fake People: No, I can’t see this as holding any water. If the producers of a film wanted lots of mannequins each sporting a glittering timepiece as the backdrop to a dream sequence where the hero finds himself in a land of frozen time…yup, that’s when the props man says to himself, I need those fake watch people. I shouldn’t think it happens much.
• Real Watches for Fake People: See above. Why equip your dummies with real watches? Simply a waste of money. Although the cast and crew might want them as souvenirs after the shooting. Could be a useful tax-dodge. Still, this surely remains a highly specialist market and therefore hardly worth building a business around that particular slogan.
• Fake Watches for Real People: This is the slogan surely used by thousands of Ebay and Car Boot sale entrepreneurs as they offload their wagon-loads of Rulexes and Potek Phillipes.

So what does “Real Watches for Real People” mean? We’ve ruled out the idea of selling fake watches for a legitimate business. We’ve struggled to see how watches might be sold for fake people. It seems that any normal watch business must be selling their legitimate timekeepers to genuine humans. How does Oris’ slogan in any way distinguish it from other manufacturers? And if it doesn’t, why on earth feature it in an ad for a product that hardly anyone reading that magazine is likely to buy?

Or, to put it another way, since I am not going to shell out the price of 4 iphones on a mere watch, I resent with some bitterness being branded, in some sense, as not a real person. Descartes, who didn’t even own a watch [Can we check this please? Researcher?: Ed] stated you were real if you could think, and I think I am thinking, or so it seems anyway. I assert my reality and my non-Oris bearing wrist and thus refute the slogan.

War, Commemoration and Art

In my last piece, I commented on a visit to see the field of ceramic poppies filling the moat at the Tower of London. This remembrance of the sacrifice of a generation is attracting huge crowds, so much so that yesterday Tower Bridge station was closed to prevent dangerous overcrowding.
The art critic Jonathan Jones has written a piece criticising the installation as inappropriate and as giving a false picture of the terrible cost of war – he prefers realistic depictions of corpses and injured troops. There has been a storm of protest against his views.
There is enormous scope to argue about whether the installation is art (and I explored the concept of what makes good art a long time ago and still stand by those views) and what is the best way to remember the fallen. In this case, although the poppies do constitute what I regard as good art (original, thought-provoking and transcending the medium), this is not the point. They are there to help us focus our thoughts. The blazing field of red is not adorned with flags or banners, photographs weapons or stirring messages. Jones’ dismissal of it as “A UKIP-style message” is wrong. It speaks directly to us of loss. Its message could not be plainer. Whether the dead fell in vain or not, they are remembered.
Jones also deplores the installation on the grounds that “the first world war was not noble”. There is a lazy (but wholly understandable) view that the war was meaningless and achieved nothing. But it did achieve something, although it took the second war to complete the job. It prevented Europe from the domination of absolutist, militaristic states. A war won by Germany would have started the process that Hitler pursued – the subjugation of as much as possible under direct German rule, the uprooting and destruction of any peoples deemed un-Germanic and the glorification of war and monarchy as the ultimate purpose for having a nation state. The writings of the Kaiser, Moltke and others directing the German High Command* during the years before the war make it clear that they despised liberal democracy, popular rule and freedom of expression and believed that history justified the “strong” doing whatever they wished to the “weak”. It was a disaster that these views could not remain confined within Germany and were the driving reason behind Austrian adventurism in the Balkans that in turn provoked the onset of war. But we can be proud that we helped put a stop to it.

*see Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns Of August” and David Fromkin’s “Europe’s Last Summer” if you want some evidence.

Poppies at the Tower

The moat encircling the Tower of London has been filled with poppies to commemorate the British fallen of World War 1 - some 880,000 hand-made ceramics that sweep almost the entire circumference of the Tower and provide a vivid contrast to the ancient grey walls.

Mrs. Commuter and I joined thousands of others at the site this morning. There is no glorification of war or any attempt to justify it or dress it up in patriotic robes. Simply the field of poppies. A gaping hole was cut into the youth of our country and it is numbing to try to grasp that each poppy stands for one of them.

 

Under the bricks

A book review in the paper I idly perused at the weekend, as one does over a pleasant lunch in the conservatory on a mild Autumn day, suggested that clichés have a useful role to play in conversation. Rather than shun them, they should be embraced as making it easy to mark changes in the direction or tone of a discourse, and provide convenient pauses between the useful content. And having digested this message, I passed on to more important matters, namely the completion of the quick crossword.

This morning, flicking through the weekend colour supplement of that same newspaper, I read an advert for John Lewis featuring a woman’s account of dealing with insomnia [Must have been gripping stuff: Ed] and encountered the phrase – “it hit me like a ton of bricks”. I started, and stopped in my tracks, [Now then, now then: Ed] because that earlier book review was still in my mind and now I could not remove the mental image of someone actually being hit by a ton of bricks.

What on earth would it be like? How would you manage to be in a position where you could be hit, anyway? The most likely scenario I could come up with has to do with being on roller-skates, hurtling down the street and failing to avoid a building site. In that case we are hitting the bricks. This is not helpful. The crucial part of the imagery is that the bricks hit us. We are passive and the bricks are actively hitting. So it must be that the bricks are in motion. Perhaps a pallet, swung high above our heads as we walk blissfully unaware past another building site (or it could be the same as the first one above). But then, should that pallet fall, it would be the pallet that would strike and the bricks merely provide the ballast. I should think being clobbered by a pallet would be bad enough, especially if one hears the cries of the builders (probably in a gentle Irish brogue) advising us to “Look out there for the love of God, why don’t you” or whatever it is that Irish builders (Not really a cliché, there’s loads of them where I live) would shout in such a situation.

How can it be that we are struck by the bricks themselves? I fancy that the builders from the example above, have, in a distracted moment (“Whist, would you look at the legs on that, Michael, that would do me very fine”) lowered a pallet loaded with the afore-mentioned ton of bricks (The average house brick weighs about 4.3 pounds, a man from the interweb informs me, and a British ton being 2240 pounds, then this load comprises about 520 of them) on top of a trolley positioned at the top of a hill that leads down to the street where you are strolling, eyes fixed on the estate agent’s windows. The trolley is unbalanced, it begins to run down the hill, the weight of the bricks keeps them together, it hurtles out of control and strikes a bollard. The bricks fly off the pallet and as one great red mass obliterate us in a storm of dust, with chips splintering off the windows and faint cries from above “Jeez would you look at that, now we’ve got to pick that lot up before the foremen gets back from his tea”.

Yes, that would be how one might be struck by a ton of bricks. As to what it is like, well, pretty rough, I imagine. Being pulped and flattened and generally pulverized must be about one of the worst feelings in the world. Would one survive the smash? I very much doubt it. So the feelings on being hit by a ton of bricks must be (and these happen pretty fast) what’s that noise? Ouch that hurts, Hell there’s loads of them, This looks pretty bad, This is pretty bad, Goodbye world.

So when something is like being struck by a ton of bricks, it is like being crushed to death in a cataclysm of noise and terror. Pretty serious stuff. Hard to see quite how our lady (Remember her? I mentioned her earlier) could really think that her experience was similar to that. Her use of this cliché, far from oiling the wheels of the piece, as it were, puts a spanner in the works [Cough!: Ed]. Being hit by a ton of bricks is not really like anything else at all. Apart from being hit by a ton of flour or potatoes or anything else that might detach from a moving load and strike us. I’d say the odds on it being like anything at all recognisable are like finding a needle in a haystack. That’s a straw-coloured needle, made of straw, and the haystack is 100 metres square and 30 metres high.

Sterling crisis hits England

No, not a run on the pound or desperate defensive measures by the Bank of England. The story gripping the nation this morning concerns a young football player who, on the eve of a European Championship qualifier against Estonia asked to be stood down because "he was a bit tired and had had a late night and eaten too many pies because some of the older players had taken him to a fashionable pie bar in Tallinn and he hadn't wanted to look weedy so he went for the dreaded beef, eel and oberwurst special and anyway his mum has written a note, and it wasn't fair because some of the bigger boys had nicer coloured boots than him and his were new and hurt a bit, and his socks kept falling down because the garter elastic his aunt had sewed was coming loose and he had a headache and the champagne on the flight must have been a bit funny because after two bottles he didn't want any more...".  Ah. Bless. Early night, son and take the rest of the week off. You only get paid a few million a year for playing 90 minutes of football a week. God knows it's not enough and, on behalf of the supporters who watched the game on TV at home and found other things to do after twenty minutes rather than put up with any more tedium, get well soon.