No nonsense advertising could help Sunderland’s recovery
With swathes of Wearside businesses now reopening, it’s in the interests of everyone in Sunderland to spend locally. Advertising could be key.
Award-winning advertising tends to be terrible and forgets why it exists, ie. to flog units.
We see ‘stylish’ ads for a well-known Irish beer involving horses galloping from the sea in slow motion (???). And when did they make the last perfume commercial that didn’t rely heavily on meaningless drivel? Probably for Tweed in the 1970s (‘for the kind of woman you are’).
Confusing sophistication with sophistry, or just pretentious cobblers, we can do without.
In Sunderland, Villa Pop used to have a cartoon bloke who was 10 feet tall. Seven of those feet were his neck as “Villa Pop goes a long way”. It also provided “Thirst aid” (geddit?).
This was simultaneously clever and daft. It makes me fancy a jug of Vil-Sasp right now.
More immediately to the point was a board outside a pie shop which, with glorious bluntness, was called The Pie Shop. It sat on Olive Street and exhorted us to: “Tak a pie home man!” As I recall, the excellent Maws Pies used posters that were even suaver.
Then there was the succinct, yet slightly threatening intonation of the slogan for what was Sunderland’s largest department store, plastered on the side of seemingly all public transport for decades. “Shop at
Binns”.
They may as well have added “...right!” But it worked. Chanel would spend millions to come up with something worse.
I remember too a now-defunct city centre pub where they printed their own advertising, on A4 paper, for “All you can drink for a tenner, 7pm-10pm”.
I doubt if they’d confused sophistication with sophistry. Added below was a piece of wonderfully self-defeating advice, which managed to contradict itself in just five words. “DRINK RESPONSIBLY! : while stocks last.”
These businesses, even The Pie Shop, failed to garner any advertising industry awards. But their efforts linger in the memory, which is all an advertising campaign can hope to achieve.
With this in mind, let us attempt to claw back some prosperity in 2020 with: “Go to some local shops and buy stuff.” It means more than it says.