Those awful advertising slogans - 2. Boss Hugo Boss

I am a little mystified by a full page colour ad in the papers. A smartly dressed and fashionably (I assume) unshaven bloke stares at us on the left side. On the right, a picture of a bottle of something that looks like a sample your doctor would turn over musingly in his hands whilst he said “I don’t want to alarm you and I’m fairly sure it’s not too advanced but don’t make any plans for this afternoon”. And some text which fails to make it much clearer. A strapline “Man of Today”. The utterly baffling “Gerard Butler for Boss Bottled”. The words Boss Hugo Boss on the bottle. And at the foot, a hashtag and a repeat of “Man of Today”.

I am hampered here by basic ignorance and a staunch refusal to try to identify who Mr Butler might be. Possibly he is the man in the sharp suit. As there is no little arrow pointing to him I don’t know. Maybe he designed the suit. Or the colour of the stuff in the bottle. Or he was the “creative” from the agency who told the model to go away and come back two days later when his beard would be scruffy enough for the photoshoot.

I am hampered further by the phrase linking Butler to Boss Bottled. Is “Bottled” a verb? Should it read “Gerard Butler for Boss, bottled”? We can imagine Butler perhaps about to take a crucial penalty for struggling Ryman League 2 side Boss. He pulls the shot, they lose and the sports reporter for the local rag has his headline. Or is bottled an adjective? A synonym for drunk? Is that what the stuff does to you? Must be powerful, the bottle looks fairly small.

We shall pass over Boss, Hugo Boss, whose name always reminds of one of Douglas Adams’ best jokes and comes from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the mysterious Slartibartfast is urging the hapless Arthur Dent to follow him;

S: You must come or you will be late
A: Late? What for?
S: What is your name, Earthman?
A: Dent, Arthur Dent.
S: Late as in the late Dent Arthur Dent. It’s a sort of threat, you see.

And that is why I always think of Boss Hugo Boss as if it were one name.

And finally the tagline “Man of Today”, so important that it merits its very own little hashtag as well, ah, bless. I wonder how many people are using it right now on Twitter and similar sites and what on earth for? If you consume a different product from BHB does that make you a man of yesterday, or the month before last?

So in conclusion, m’lud, it is my contention that I have no idea what is being advertised or why it has anything to do with men or today and, as Lord Sugar would say in another context, that’s why I fired it.

Italian return to sense

The decision, two years ago, to prosecute earthquake scientists for "manslaughter" for failing to warn about the deadly shocks in L'Aquila in 2009 has finally been overturned on appeal, I gather from the BBC. Hopefully somebody will now prosecute the prosecution for stupidity, colossal waste of public funds and making a mockery of Italian justice.

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.