Claire Beale on Advertising

She wore scarves and pearly lipstick and the orange powder made the hairs on her face stand up. She had shiny blouses and ankles with angles. Our Avon Lady was a beacon of trim elegance in a sea of 70s lumpy Crimplene.

Her magic, though, was really the transformational promise of her glossy catalogue and the little palettes of jewel colours she sometimes delivered, a glamourous world away from the dusty tray of browns in the local chemist.

Related articles

• Beale's Best In Show: Volkswagen Golf (DDB)
• Search the news archive for more stories

Over the years the Avon Lady herself has become a dusty relic: a product of a time before the shopping centre explosion and the arrival of e-tailing. Type Avon into Google today and the first thing that comes up is Avonshop.co.uk; you can order anything from the range for next day delivery. But apparently the Avon Lady has been hard at it all along, all 5.4 million of them around the world, even through the retail revolution. And now the cosmetics giant is bringing back its recruitment advertising for the first time in 30 years in a bid to encourage a new generation of Ladies to sign up as doorstep brand ambassadors.

If you're old enough I bet you remember the original ads. "Ding dong, Avon calling", offering ordinary Ladies the chance to earn money, win some independence and build their own business, all quite novel back then.

The new ads are nothing to speak of creatively and feel quite dated: a couple of basic commercials with women eulogising about the joys – financial, social – of joining the Avon army. But they're warm and the Avon Ladies in the ads look nice and it's all very approachable. And later this week Hollywood's girl-next-door Reece Witherspoon is starring in a new Avon lipstick ad to bring a bit of celebrity gloss to the home-spun recruitment commercials.

The ads, though, are only part of the story. If the Avon Lady didn't exist, someone would invent her. These days advertisers are drought-thirsty for a more one-to-one relationship with their consumers. Of course, by this they mostly mean allowing us to interact with their web sites, or gathering our names, addresses, emails so that they can send us leaflets, magazines, samples. It's not exactly intimate.

Avon, though, is one of those rare brands where one-to-one marketing is at the essence of the company: the Avon Lady is core to the way Avon operates, even in this online-shopping-next-day delivery era.The ads won't win any creative awards but as a marketing strategy, the Avon Lady is an idea that may have its time again. Embedding your brand advocates in the community is very "now", particularly when so many other retailers have sacrificed their friendly and familiar sales people in the migration from high street to web.

Avon Ladies take the trouble to talk to you, show you how to use the products, tell you how they will plump up your skin or open up your eyes. They'll drink your tea, have a chat, make you feel human instead of a reference number on an emailed invoice. And it's much harder to say no to a person than a website; even in this digital age, we still like buying from people we like.

It's the end of an era. The Halifax's creative account is being put up for pitch. And although the agency responsible for the bank's all-singing-all-dancing commercial extravaganzas is going to make a play to keep the business, chances are that Howard Brown and the troupe of Halifax employees are set for the commercial chop. If you've seen the latest ad, you'll understand why. In it Thomas, fresh from a call centre in Leeds, makes his debut for the High Interest Current Account, twinkle-toeing through "I'm into something good". If you go to the Halifax website you can learn how to do the "something Good" dance.

It's not necessarily that the ad itself is so awful (though plenty think it is) but the style is so familiar that it's become advertising wallpaper. The charm of the early ads – so different to what you'd expect from the sector – has become redundant. And let's not forget that banks are in a credit-crunch sticky patch, so expect a few more advertising reviews in the financial services sector.

Anyway, the agency behind Halifax's monstrous musicals, Delaney Lund Knox Warren, has something of a reputation for singing ads (like the AA's "You've got a Friend").

But last week DLKW's two creative chiefs Malcolm Green and Gary Betts, who were responsible for most of the agency's populist musical ads, quit, and with Halifax now shakey we could be seeing the end of the big musical commercials. Adland may snigger, but life will be a little more dull without them.

the fallon backlash has begun. It might still be the best ad agency in London – for now – but creatives have sniffed blood with a couple of merely good ads from Fallon unleashed over the last few days. Online punches were soon being thrown as the critics waded in.

The first ad to raise a few expletives was for Sony. Fallon usually makes great ads for Sony. This time it has made a nice ad, for the Handycam and Cybershot cameras. But nice was never going to live up to the hype

This promised to be big spectacle stuff. Downtown Miami was flooded with 460 million litres of foam, then 200 residents were armed with cameras to capture the event and bloggers and journalists were invited to the seven day shoot to get the cyberbuzz going.

But now we've actually seen the ad, and it's a little bit too much like Fallon's Sony Balls ad, but without all the lovely colours.

The other Fallon ad in the dock this week is for Budweiser. Part of the problem here is not Fallon's own hard-to-live-up-to history with the brand, but Bud's own track record for stand-out advertising. Remember the bar-setting "whassup", which passed into popular culture. Then there was the Frogs ad, which hit a similar nerve. These were world-beating commercials from DDB Chicago. Now Fallon has been handed the UK account and the results are not quite so exciting.

The ad shows lots of hillbillies making sweet music using Bud bottles as instruments. It's been given a hammering by London's cynical (mostly male) creative community, who are no doubt enjoying the opportunity to burst Fallon's bubble.

There are certainly a few sour notes in the Fallon ad. The Bud bottles have been painfully inserted into every scene ...not a sign of a confident, cool client. And using your brand to make music is the new cliché (though at least this time its beer bottles not car parts). And the whole thing feels a bit too try-hard rather than a naturally joyous and confident expression of the brand. Even so I bet there's a generation of bum-fluffed new drinkers who will find this cool.

So could these two ads officially signal the end of adland's love of "Fallonatio"? Well, it's definitely time for some new creative heroes. But where are they?

Claire Beale is editor of Campaign