Everything Else

I have a real interest in advertising and the way it meets popular culture, or even becomes part of it. I guess it’s like the unmentioned or unreviewed artform a lot of the time.

Perhaps some people have reservations about the strictly commercial nature of the ad, but I like to imagine the advertising creative are just producing art within a strict set of rules and guidelines, just like countless actual artists. You could also argue that art does have roots in advertising, given that in the past artists would paint the portraits of their patrons.

One of the best examples of ads becoming part of popular culture is the Ronseal ad above. That’s a slightly newer version of a campaign that anyone who lives in the UK or Ireland will be instantly familiar with. If you google the slogan “it does exactly what it says on the tin” you get 182,000 results, including a Wikipedia entry.

What I find interesting about this Ronseal slogan is how it seems to describe not just a hardware product, but an entire outlook, an artistic aesthetic. This massive ad campaign manages to come across as anti-marketing, telling you that Ronseal products are devoid of nonsense, frills or pretention. It taps deep into the way we look at products and even art, and peoples slightly kneejerk paranoia about anything pretentious or lofty.

But the proof of what a curiously useful slogan this was is apparent in its spread throughout popular culture. It’s actually not uncommon to find people using the phrase “it does exactly what it says on the tin” about TV shows or records, which shows just how perfectly it sums up a particular artistic approach.

In an age where everything comes with a marketing campaign (even Ronseal) , people act as though simplicity and a lack of pretention is something that should always be lauded. I can’t help but feel that many people think art should “do exactly what it says on the tin”, or come in a tin that says exactly what it does on it. I guess there is a certain allure to this approach if people were truly fascist about it.

But is it ultimately desirable? Do we really want records or TV shows or books to be as straight forward as hardware products? Isn’t marketing and hype and image and mystery what makes things interesting? And of course, even doing exactly what something says on the tin is an image in itself.

I mean, there are occasions where this aesthetic fits an artistic product perfectly(and as a techno writer I’m well used to enjoying records that are akin to hardware products, functional, non-descript, essential), it’s important, I think, to be conscious of just how artless a proscription it is, how quintessentially British or Irish it is. Was this ad shown around Europe or in America? It would be interesting to know, it seems unlikely.

Also, there’s a pleasant irony in the genuine artistic beauty of the aesthetical bullseye achieved by that Ronseal campaign. You could say it was an ad that actually did far more than it said on the tin.

(Anyone have any other examples of ads or slogans that became part of life like this? In Ireland, I think the political party Fianna Fáil’s “A Lot Done, More To Do” really seemed to engrain itself and become a phrase people used divorced from the ad campaign. I guess Budweiser’s “Wazzup” also is an example of this, but I don’t like this one as much since it was a blatant grope for the status it achieved, rather than a sort of accidental triumph. Also, a company like Ronseal must have a pretty small advertising budget, which makes the achievement all the more fascinating. I wonder does the man who wrote the ad ever laugh to himself about creating a phrase. Such a rare boast.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 10:22 am and is filed under Ads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.