Evil Advertising: Specsavers and Edith Piaf
Posted by shaunoc1 on February 5, 2008
Has anyone seen the new Specsavers advert “featuring” Edith Piaf?
In it, she sings probably her most famous song, “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”. The subtitles show an incorrect translation of the French lyrics, saying that her only regret is not having bought glasses at Specsavers.
This is a song about and performed by a chronic alcoholic and drug user looking back on her life, and saying that she regrets nothing; that all the pain was worth it for her to become the person she now is. It is poignant and heartfelt.
Specsaver’s hijacking of the song and the woman to offload a couple of pairs of glasses is, in my opinion, beyond reprehensible. Aside from the fact that it takes the personal, emotional core of the song and castrates it for the sake of corporate “humour”, did any of the firm’s copywriters do any research on the woman whatsoever? If they had, they would have known that from the ages of three to seven, Piaf was blind as a result of the disease Keratitis. That’s right, Specsavers have tastefully chosen to parody a dead alcoholic who had no sight as a child.
How could this ad have been passed as suitable for broadcast? How could noone have objected to it? Using a dead person to sell a product is tantamount to graverobbery. It’s just as classy as Benetton’s ad featuring a young man dying of AIDS.
fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
I think that controversy is a wonderful thing. But in the hands of advertisers, it is always suspect. There is always the ulterior motive, the hidden agenda. Everything they show you is designed to get you to do something. To not only buy a product, but to buy into a lifestyle (as Naomi Klein brilliantly argued in “No Logo”). Slogans like ”Drink Coke” are not suggestions; they are orders, screamed at you from every poster and billboard, every television, every radio.
I feel embarrassed if I am watching a movie or programme with someone and the ads come on. It’s like a group of corporate idiots have marched into the room and started barking commands at you and yours. I find ads depressing in general; when the local companies have Christmas “all wrapped up” (brilliant) and multinationals are using Edith Piaf, there is little creativity in the divide.
I’m not getting my anarchist on; far from it. I know that advertising is a necessary evil. Much brilliant creative work is funded by it. But when it’s so evil it can reanimate the corpses of our dearly departed, it must be stopped.
It brings to mind Bill Hicks’ famous words about advertisers :
Sandy Strallen said
The SEX nasal spray ad campaign:
DELIGHTED to see that the advertising standards authority have insisted that the huge 160 giant poster site campaign throughout December 2008 has been stopped dead in its tracks following an unprecedented amount of complaints against the company selling the product and the outdoor poster ad company that ran the campaign on their behalf.
What is perhaps most upsetting is that their advertising company TITAN OUTDOOR ADVERTISING chose to run the campaign a week before Christmas which meant that not only did these appalling advertisements appear at a time when the maximum amount of people (particularly families with children ) would be exposed to them whilst out and about doing their CHRISTMAS shopping, but cynically safe in the knowledge that there was probably nothing that could be done about them until everyone was back in their offices after the new year.
It might give pause for thought, before we are assailed by something even worse.
This is the year in which we should all remember that as recently as June 2008 we ALL thought the Financial Services Authorities around the world had their finger on the economic pulse and we STILL trusted banks…hahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
No-one is really watching the people who are paid currently enormous amounts of filthy lucre to screw with our minds – be afraid, it is much, much later than you think.
In the words of the song
” …..if you tolerate this, then your children will be next ”
Copy of a letter sent to the advertising company in charge of the SX nasal spray ads:
In a world in which the incessant barrage of gratuitous public pornography assails our every waking moment, in which the sexualisation of pre-pubescent children is the advertiser’s wet-dream, where the incidence of playground violence and particularly sexual-violence by minors on minors is increasing exponentially, you have chosen to accept and promote a sad little fake product using one of the crassest campaigns that the benighted Advertising industry has ever seen.
The SEX ads have finally been pulled, but not before they have managed to offend countless thousands , possibly millions of passers-by and affect the reading patterns of hundreds of children who have cast their eyes out of a passing car and spent the next three hours repeating the word SEX into the ears of their increasingly disturbed parents.
MTV, anti-Social networking sites and countless other media machinery do nothing but promote the endless commercialisation of the sexual act, 13 year old middle-class white girls rejoice in Bebo and Facebook names such as Blow-Job Baby, Slut-Queen, Potty-Mouth and Crack-Whore, the advertising “industry” and its Pit-Bull accessory, “Slebrity Kultcha”, virtually indistinguishable from the “adult entertainment” industry, is absolutely without boundaries and now operates seemingly devoid of any reference to any kind of relative social values.
What is most surprising is that we all go ” Oh! No!! Shock – Horror!!” when yet another appalling sex-crime surfaces in which the wide eyed and lily handed media-barons and particularly the advertising industry go ” ….surely not US guvnor ! It’s society wot’s to blame!……………”.
Did not one of you actually make a nervous clearing of the throat in your graciously appointed board-rooms, offices, planning meetings and account management sessions as you waved the nasal spray SEX ad through whatever passes for checks and balances in your organisation?
Was there not a single one of you who for even the most fleeting of moments, wondered whether you were going to be merely profitable accessories to causing the most excrutiating amount of offence to the travelling public?
In the tiny moments you catch your fevered, stressed, avaricious little reflections in the bathroom mirror as you prepare for another day of trying to force feed us crap in 3 foot high dayglo letters from your strategically placed shill-boards, will you pause for thought over this note?
I suspect not, but there you go. You all deserve the sad empty venal little lives that is the ad-man’s personal purgatory.
No-one is really watching the people who are paid currently enormous amounts of filthy lucre to screw with our minds – be afraid, it is much, much later than you think.
In the words of the song
” …..if you tolerate this, then your children will be next “