THE NON-CHANGING FACE OF ADVERTISING
Greg Bruce looks at what ads are really selling us
Gregg’s Instant Coffee, 1970: A man in a leather jacket watches from a balcony as many faces of different races walk past, looking at each other, looking happy, looking pensive, looking at things in the distance. A guy in a rugby jersey, doing a peace sign, takes part in a protest march; a couple sit on a bench eating apples, looking like they might be at a crossroads in their relationship. The song, the melody of which sounds vaguely protesty, tells a relatively unvarnished story of modern New Zealand — “Different races, many faces ... living in a time when things are changing.”
Having taken it all in, the man on the balcony goes back into his cool-looking office or apartment, pops his pipe in his mouth and starts banging away at a typewriter, presumably writing something meaningful and telling — a groundbreaking television ad? — about the deeply evocative street scene he’s just witnessed.
It’s effectively a 50-second movie, rammed full of life and meaning and featuring at least one gratuitous bum shot. It was more revealing of the nature of New Zealand society in 1970 than most scheduled programming of the time, or of any time, including the present. It might have been our first great television ad, a marker signalling the dawn of the ad break as an entertainment phenomenon that would draw us together, help define us as a people and that now, nearly 50 years later, may finally be over.
When Gillette last month released a television ad in the United States that went viral and created a furore because it suggested men have a history of behaving badly, I was surprised, mostly by the fact that anyone still watches ads on TV.
The Gregg’s “Different Faces, Many Faces” ad was made by a genius called Tony Williams, who would go on to make some of the most brilliant and entertaining ads in New Zealand television history, including the Crunchie Great Train Robbery, which ran for 20 years. That ad depicted a number of people attempting to rob a train of a chest of Crunchie bars, in an escalating scene featuring multiple explosions, a plane on a bombing run and an ever-growing number of passengers running amok until the train is just a mess of humanity in various states of dress. Finally, an old woman who had been sitting quietly, knitting through the whole thing, pulls the emergency brake, sends everyone flying and ends up with all the Crunchies. The impossibly unimaginative, unbelievably catchy jingle ran: “Have a Crunchie, hokey pokey bar, crazy Crunchie, hokey pokey bar.”
Williams also made the international awardwinning 1981 ad for BASF, in which a soldier posted overseas gets a message from his fiancee — recorded on BASF cassette tape — and discovers as he plays it for the platoon that it’s a Dear John letter in song form. The humour is in the song — “Tonight I’m with another / You’d like him John, he’s your brother” — but the genius is in the pathos of the reactions from the hypermasculine listening soldiers, themselves reading letters from home. It’s funny and it’s moving. The tagline was, “Even the bad times sound good.”
Williams made the Toyota “Bugger” ad, the Telecom Spot ads, the Air New Zealand “Being There is Everything” ads and the Hyundai ad where a baby boy picks up a hitchiking baby girl in his Hyundai SUV, then goes surfing on the West Coast. Each one was a classic of the form.
EVERYONE KNOWS the name Peter Jackson, whose leading work reflects us back at ourselves only in picturesque mountains and bit-part actors but who among us knows the name Tony Williams, whose most ambitious work helped to define both a creative form and a nation?
Williams started his career as a serious filmmaker, with all the potential glamour, fame and credibility inherent in that choice. There was no glamour in directing ads — he got a lawnmower for making the Crunchie commercial — but his legacy is to have created some of the most discussed, memorable, culturally important pieces of televised communication in this country’s history.
That legacy flowed through other great creators too, through the 1970s, 80s and even into the increasingly internet-soaked 2000s: Crumpy and Scotty, Mainland Cheese’s old dudes, BNZ’s “You’re a New Zealander”; the Anchor family, Lion Red’s “Red-blooded blood brothers”, ASB’s “Goldstein”, Ghost Chips.
These ads gave us the surprise of first viewing, that rush of pleasure from seeing something unexpectedly good in an ad break otherwise filled with drudge and repetition. But they also derived power from the environment in which we watched them, which was typically at home, with our families, a shared experience. And they derived power from the way we engaged with them, which was typically to talk about them at school and work and at boring parties, sharing our thoughts, opinions, judgments: “Have you seen that ad for ... ?”
They were ways for us to connect and to share ourselves and to tell us what we thought of ourselves. The best ones, through their humour, storytelling and aesthetic became embedded in us, especially those of us who grew up with them, whose senses of humour, storytelling and aesthetics were developing as they developed us.
They derived power, too, from the way in which we reflected on them, as we are doing now, years later. We remember not just the ads themselves but where we lived when we watched them, who we loved at the time, what we were doing with our lives. Their messages and values and emotional pitch become entwined with all that, inseparable from it. The argument I’m making here is that the ads we loved best became part of us.
But, as you may have noticed, this is all in the past tense. Because who watches television ads anymore? Televisual ads, if we watch them at all, are now personalised, targeted via algorithm, rarely watched as collective experience, seldom of New Zealand and by New Zealanders. The idea that we will ever again all see the same thing and be united by it has gone.
Should we mourn its loss? Humour, pleasure, a good story well told, a shared sense of connection: these are all good, but is there something less good? Yes, a few things: the endless interruptions, the convincing us to buy things that are bad for us, the lack of non-white people. There are many problems with ads, but let’s start where Gillette left off.
What that ad depicted was toxic masculinity defined as the most overt forms of bad male behaviour — bullying, sexual harassment, abuse of power — with results that are easy to see and to define. But toxicity exists in more pernicious forms too, in
The ads we loved best became part of us.