Advertisers, you're missing the obvious mark

I often refer to my “self-employed” ilk as over-glorified bums. The characterisation is much closer to the truth than we like to admit. This thought recently, as I sat down for a drink with an unemployed cousin of mine. At 10am. On a Tuesday.

A minor epiphany hit me; this particular Durban-beachfront-hotel pub had a (conservatively) 70% “occupancy rate”. On a Tuesday morning. Ohmygod, the unemployed river banks are bursting, I found myself thinking. And they are having a ball in the midst of a nearly Great Depression.

The next revelation followed faster than green flies arrive at the scene of a tripe spill. Employed people are an extremely price-sensitive lot. I guess it has a lot to do with perpetually grousing about what they had to go through to get their grubby hands on the moolah. (Consider the anguish I’m going through to pen this gibberish). But your average occupation-deficient individual couldn’t care less about such frivolous considerations.

I’m ashamed to declare that, during these recessionary times, I have uttered the words, “Single Klippies on the rocks” to a waiter. Not my unwaged cousin. He ordered himself a double 12-year-old single malt Scotch — and the obligatory Red Bull mixer to kill the “raw” flavour. All on silly employed mummy dearest, of course.

Thirty to 60% of our population is not gainfully employed, depending on whose rubbish stats you believe. And yet practically every advertising campaign is aimed at the employed. This is as misguided as aiming Gucci handbag ads at Barack Obama because Michelle is “unemployed”. Billions of rands’ worth of purchasing decisions are made by our vagrants and other general loiterers every day in this country — all on mommy, granny or sugar daddy, of course.

But how many ads have you seen featuring two okes in animated conversation in a UIF queue? At least 10 million South Africans would relate to that.

My brain functions in mysterious and wondrous ways and it wasn’t too long before I started asking myself who the other forgotten people are in this advertising madness. That led me straight to illegal aliens, all 2 — 10 million of them, depending on whose crappy guestimations scratch your itch.

And the next sentence is sure to get the ad agency in question fired. Can someone tell me why there hasn’t been an ad featuring Prosperity and Tendai flying over the Zim-SA border fence because “Red Bull gives you wings”? I didn’t think anybody could.

And I don’t think anyone can explain to me rationally the ad industry’s Calvinistic obsession with the mom-dad-and-two-kids family? Where do these copywriters live, Pofadder? When has the ad industry become the Family Values Gestapo? This nation is not The Cosby Show. That’s stretching the truth worse than spandex around Oprah’s thighs back in the day before she went on a weight-loss drug she won't name.

I’ll give an A+ to the ad agency presenting a Bill Clinton lookalike ravenously digging into a Royco stew at a Monica-Lewinsky-lookalike mistress’s apartment. (Bonus marks if she’s kneeling in-between his legs, goddamnit). And if, in the next frame, the camera zooms in on the family values, Knorr-inspired White House dinner table where a Hillary lookalike sits sulking with a prominently empty seat at the head’ of the table, I’ll sommer start throwing small denomination bills at the TV screen.

Never mind the fact that, in the traditional-family-values frenzy, we’ve completely ignored the whole Civil Union, same sex family niche. Picture it; an ad with two, all-male couples, discussing erectile dysfunction, with the payoff line, “EDS. Everybody has a bad day.” I’ll put my member on the chopping block (no pun) that the pharmaceutical that goes with that ad would corner 15% of the EDS market. I mean, gay tent poles malfunction too.

This led my thoughts to the other “forgottens” in this market. I’m talking about the illiterate, the dyslexic, ADD sufferers and post-Y2K university graduates. None of them can read, yet major brands are busy running ads that are dependent on the ability to read on-screen graphics. And why would Adcock Ingram run camphor ads depicting Eskimos-on-ice? Hello, Samwu striking workers toyi-toying in front of the mayor’s office on a minus 3°C Jozi morning? Did anyone think to hand out sachets to the marchers under a mammoth billboard announcing, “Ingram's Camphor Cream Gets You That 13.5%"? In the words of the senile Bill Cosby, “Come on people!”

And while we’re on the senility tip, who’s cocooning the increasingly swelling, gullible born-again segment? These people deserve their own notch on the LSM sliding scale, I swear. Can you imagine Castle Lager’s own Tony Leon-instigated “Fight Back” campaign against the inroads being made by Windhoek Lager and its “100% real” campaign. However, in Castle's case, the main character is accosted by a voice emanating from a burning bush — okay, maybe a burning pot plant — as he reaches for a beer. “What are you doing Mo? Are we in Namibia? Real men don’t drink beer in green bottles.” Tell me that ad wouldn’t work, even if it only ran for two weeks before it was pulled after the Reverend Meshoe’s complaint to the ASA.

And if you’re thinking “but Universal Church born-again types don’t drink beer,” ... “If a beer is consumed and there’s no-one to witness it, was the beer really consumed?”