Christmas time is a broadly horrible time of year. Horrible decorations, horrible music, horrible gifts that smell remarkably of "that'll do". All these things add to the horror show that is this time of year. Yet there is one area that really gets on my proverbial 'tits', and that is the area of Christmas specific adverts.
These adverts tend to suggest unlikely events such as familial bliss around the Christmas tree or of unbridled joy on receiving gift vouchers. But, as reprehensible a lie as these things are, they are not the true source of my christmas advert ire. That is reserved for 'fragrance' adverts, even though the adverts are not per se christmas ones.
In any normal advertising meeting, the people from the company in question would come to the advertisers with a product; explain what the product does; the demographic they wish to appeal to; and the sort of tenor the advert should have. This cannot be the same for smells. Television is a visual and audio media thus appealing to our senses of sight and hearing, leaving out smell and touch (unless the advert is somewhat pornographic or involves Nigella Lawson licking her fingers). Thus to convey something that is olfactory in a form of media that is not, is an impossible task. An impossible task that they fail at every time.
But why the dislike? They are just trying to sell their product in a crowded marketplace, so why shouldn't they 'push the boat out' like some smelly version of the lifeboat men? Again I return to the adverts themselves and their similar content. They all have sexual undertones of some variety, they all use infeasibly attractive individuals and they all leave people heavily confused as to what it is they have just seen. 'Who is that woman draped over a car?' 'Why is she standing on the edge of a building?' 'Who's that broody gentleman heading in her direction?' 'Did I just witness a sexual act for 3-4 seconds at 4 in the afternoon?' They leave you with questions that for a second just confuse your brain and then later just annoy you that you even had to think of it.
They are trying to sell an idea of a brand that they have built around a smell. So what they end up doing is trying to sell is a pot of smelly fluid, based on an idea of what that smell should make you feel like and think of through the medium of a 30 second advert that tries to get this entirely constructed idea across to an audience of people who can't smell. Don't know why they bother really.
So in short, if anyone was thinking of getting me 'eau de toilette' for Christmas, don't buy it based on anything other than value for money and your own nostrils. And by the way, no, just because it's in French does not make 'toilet water' sound any more appealing to throwing about my person. Anyway, back to my humbugs...
