Servin’ up bad manners

No wonder this television advert sparked over one thousand complaints!  It makes speaking with your mouthful socially acceptable. The fact that a Zinger Chicken Salad explicitly makes it tolerable speak to your colleagues with a mouthful is one of the many reasons why I loathe this advert.

 

The thing that annoys me most about this advert is the fact that not only is it set in a call centre, but it is set in an emergency call centre! Just imagine how you would feel if you were mid crisis, you called someone to help you at your time of need, and you were confronted with someone singing down the phone at you incoherently with a mouthful of Kentucky fried chicken. That would not calm my nerves in the least bit!

A spokeswoman from KFC said “the advert is intended to be humorous”. Who’s sense of humour the advert appeals to I will don’t know? The funniest and cleverest thing about the advert is the catchy alliteration used right at the end of the advert: “servin’ up soul”. Even that is not that big or that clever!

The majority of people that complained to the Advertising Standards Authority are parents and although I’m not a parent I can empathise entirely with them. Not only does the advert encourage children to speak with their mouthful, but it makes it socially acceptable in our society. It begs the questions what do advertisers think should become socially acceptable next?

To be honest I would never buy a Zinger Chicken Salad from KFC out of principle. Those annoying people from the emergency call centre, singing annoyingly, with a mouthful of annoying Kentucky fried chicken are enough to put anyone off from being able to stomach their lunch.

Controlled Assessment Success Criteria

Make your reasons why you love/loathe your chosen advert clear.

Use sophisticated language for effect.

Think about the form, audience and purpose or your article.

Make sure your work is well structured and this includes the use of discourse markers.

Ask yourself, am I impressed with my own work? If not ask yourself how can I make my work impressive?

Use a variety of sentence structures.

Use a variety of punctuation (at least three).

Do the best job you can with your spelling.

Use language devices/rhetorical techniques in your writing.

 

I have also managed to put the powerpoint onto my pickup. Please feel free to email me with any questions/queries.

 

Miss Warner

Why an actual horse and not a Ferrari?

Here are the links from today's lesson:
Old Spice advert:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE
Lynx advert:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfeVEAZkJqM
Jean Paul Gaultier advert:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQf3xCXrVzI
Miss Warner
 

 

The John Lewis Christmas Advert from 2011

Here is a copy of the article from today's lesson:

This year’s Christmas adverts aren’t adverts they’re ‘events’. Ghastly events.

Nothing merely "happens" any more: every occurrence is now an "event", which leaps up and down pointing excitedly at itself. Once, the end of a school term would be marked with a shabby disco down the village hall; you'd turn up wearing the one pair of jeans you owned and circumnavigate the dancefloor nodding your head to the sound of Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go. Now, in 2011, teenagers don outfits chosen by their personal stylist weeks in advance and arrive at their school "prom" in a stretch Hummer. Come, friendly asteroids, and fall on Earth.

 

Christmas adverts are the retail industry's end-of-term disco, and they have undergone a similar transformation. Not so long ago they were bald sales pitches with a bit of tinsel Sellotaped to the edges. Now the law dictates that any high street chain worth its salt has to bombard the populace with some unctuous cross between a feelgood movie and a Children in Need special.

 

Take the John Lewis commercial. I heard it coming before I saw it: reports reached me of people blubbing in front of their televisions, so moved were they by this simple tale of a fictional boy counting the hours until he can give his parents a gift for Christmas. Given the fuss they were making, the tears they shed, you'd think they were watching footage of shoeless orphans being kicked face-first into a propeller. But no. They were looking at an advert for a shop.

 

Failing to cry at an advert for a shop does not make me cold, incidentally. I have cried at films from ET to Waltz with Bashir, at news coverage of disasters, at sad songs, and at the final paragraph of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. I cried at these things because they were heartbreaking. And because none of them was an advert for a shop.

 

An advert for a shop. That's all the John Lewis thing is, and as such it's no more moving than the "So Near, So Spar" campaign of the mid-1980s. Anyone who cries at this creepy advert is literally sobbing IQ points out of their body. Is this really what we've become – a species that weeps at adverts for shops? A commercial has only made me feel genuinely sad on one occasion – 25 January 1990, when a falling billboard nearly killed 'Allo 'Allo star Gorden Kaye.

 

Fortunately Kaye recovered. Unlike the family dog in that advert. Yes, it's clear to me that the box at the end of the John Lewis ad actually contains the severed head of the family dog, and that this advert is actually a chillingly accurate short film about the yuletide awakening of a psychopath-in-training. In July the dog was butchered with a breadknife: the deranged young assailant has been waiting since then to present his "trophy" to his parents. Those are the facts. And anyone who thinks I'm lying, bear this in mind: I have asked John Lewis directly (over Twitter) to confirm or deny whether there's a dog's head in that box, and so far it has maintained a stony silence on the issue. Which speaks for itself. So don't sob for the syrupy Christmas story – sob for the slaughtered hound, you selfish and terrible idiots.

 

By Charlie Brooker The Guardian, Sunday 20^th November 2011

Here is the link to the advert:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSLOnR1s74o

Go Compare advert!

Here is the link for the article we looked at in today's lesson: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2189246/Stuart-Pearce-Go-Compare-advert.html The video links are here also.
Miss Warner

Love or loathe these adverts!?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUyxIoitg_M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_2Az4HjiQo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGIN_SbjtYA

Can you add your own links and your own opinion?

Miss Warner