When is an Advert Not an Advert?

Never, is the answer.

On the radio the other day I heard an advert for a Japanese car manufacturer (they’re not getting free advertising from me) that proudly stated: “we don’t need a fancy advert”. The statement seemed to say ‘Our product stands on its own’ and apparently it wasn’t their job — you know, the company that got paid millions to create a marketing campaign for this product — to explain the car they were selling any further. The irony being that the ad then had a thirty second terms & conditions explainer at the end. So it might not be a “fancy ad” yet somehow still needed caveats. And this wasn’t the first time I’d heard something like this either. A certain high street food chain and a budget internet provider both proudly deny the nature of the advertisements in recent campaigns too. One just being a brief image of food with no audio as if the steaming, dripping fare was all that was required to sell it, the other literally fast forwarding through it’s own ad — that was clearly fully shot and edited, by the way — implying it knows how disinterested the audience are in its sales pitch so it can ‘skip to the good part’. It’s a strange form of self-denial that still manages to tick all the boxes of what an advert is supposed to do. “We’re not an ad, but thanks for watching this ad” is the end product.

This is nothing new. In my youth I remember an advert for a particular chocolate biscuit brand that was so self-referential about it’s previous successful campaign it didn’t feel the need to mention the product name at all. It relied totally on ‘brand awareness’ without ever explicitly advertising the product. Similar to how a certain insurance market comparison website used a CGI mongoose to sell its wares by insisting people were going to the wrong website with a similar name. Even going so far as to create the fake website that redirected to the correct one. So successful was the campaign it took a relatively obscure service, let alone company, into the public consciousness and made it a household name. Thirteen years later and this ad campaign is still running with little to no actual depiction of whatever the hell this company is selling these days. It looks like cinema tickets, I think? What all of these examples seem to spell out is how much people hate advertising, how much these marketing firms are aware of how…