Gerry Moira: The more successful you are, the stupider the adverts aimed at you

OK, three words right? Recession. Recession. Recession. If I had a thousand pounds for every time I heard the words “credit crunch”, I wouldn’t be worried about any recession. Indeed, my extensive research among the chief financial officers of London’s leading agencies has pointed to an almost jaunty “Crisis, what crisis?” Admittedly this is a somewhat uneasy calm. As one senior bean-counter confessed to me, “Any minute now I expect the cold hand of reality to grab me by the scruff of the neck, march me down to the basement car park and slam my nuts repeatedly in the glove compartment of the company Jag.”

In advertising, the glass is not only half full, but almost always raised in a cheeky “Salut”. It is as if working in the “good news business” has rendered us incapable of accepting bad news. In fact this obdurate optimism is, I think, one of our most endearing traits.

However, there’s no escaping the fact that many staffers, especially in the larger networks, have been “walked Spanish down the hall” as they say in Joshua Ferris’s funny and moving |book Then We Came to the End. Whether this is due to individual agency misfortune or UK recession is a moot point. Suffice it to say that too many good people are looking forward to longer summer hols than they originally anticipated.

One consequence of recession is the market model known as the “hourglass”, whereby the value and luxury sectors continue to flourish, squeezing the living margins out of the mid-market brands. Early indications are that we’ll be buying more food from Aldi and Lidl and less from Marks & Spencer. “But whither your Guccis?” I hear you cry. (Sounds like a Borgia curse.)

In my forthcoming book |Luxury Branding: Is it Beau Luxe or What? I examine the phenomenon known as the inverse stupid/rich ratio. This stunning riposte to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs posits that the cleverer and more successful you become, the more crass and moronic the luxury brand advertising targeted at you. Your Oxbridge degree and Harvard MBA appear to have equipped you to decode straplines like “The art of time” or “The essence of now”. (Or indeed, “The now of essence”.) If you’ve used your wits and hard work to claw your way up the |corporate ladder, you may be |confronted with propositions as subtle and complex as:

Do you want to be mistaken for George Clooney? Then buy our vermouth/coffee/watch.

Do you wish to commit acts of unimaginable depravity with a supermodel? Then buy our cologne/clothes/cognac.

I’m not saying that intellect, taste and disposable income are directly, inextricably linked. Anyone who saw the Hello! spread on Gary Neville’s lovely home can testify to exceptions. Similarly, I recall a journalist closing her intimate interview in the Ike and Tina Turner Memphis mansion with the line, “I never realised you could spend a million bucks in K-Mart”.

But, for the love of God, surely there’s something wrong when you contrast the effort and |invention that goes into selling a couple of quid worth of Pot |Noodle with the paucity of |imagination behind advertising for a two-grand handbag.

“True craftsmanship needs no salesman”, coo the luxury brands. “The less you say the more desirable you become”, trill the experts. That may be true if you want to be a dumb blonde all your life, but people who can read without moving their lips have come to expect more. I don’t mean jokes or expensive TV ads, but I, for one, would like to buy into an idea when I fork out for my hand-tooled leather love-|object. Paying Nicole Kidman, fragrant though she may be, to wear your perfume is not an idea.

According to the Millward Brown consultancy, Hollywood stars pitched up as pitchmen and women in 14 per cent of all advertising last year. The ratio in the luxury sector is higher. A quarter of all ads in India are celebrity-led. The figures reach nearly half in Taiwan. Without any disparagement of the advertising talent in those respective countries this is very basic, class-one-in-the-infants stuff. The advertising scenario so precisely and painfully portrayed by Bill Murray in Lost in Translation is now becoming a worldwide reality. Where is irony? Where is wit? Where are my good friends argument and persuasion? Did Bill Bernbach die in vain?

It is no wonder the luxury brands are losing billions to knock-off copies when they offer nothing to the consumer beyond the visual. If it looks like a Prada bag, it’s as good as a Prada bag. So much of traditional “luxe” advertising doesn’t give the consumer any other set of criteria with which to make a differentiated choice. The world’s magazines are full of page after page of the same pouting, po-faced models posing and smug celebs co-branding. Oh, and lifeless product shots with gnomic straplines hinting at a state of fulfilment somewhere “beyond the ultimate”.

Some caveats: there are brands, such as Louis Vuitton, that do this stuff so well it defies criticism. There are brands, such as Jaguar, who cleverly adopt the language of luxe to challenge the German hegemony in their market. There are brands, such as Patek Philippe, who actually have an idea. Also I concede that sometimes international brands have to move at the speed of their most nascent markets. I grant that women “read” ads differently from men, that the semiotics are often more important than the logic. I confess to being a “leeeteral Eeenglishman”, always looking for the hook when sometimes it is just enough to have a look. I remember losing a luxury pitch to a continental agency whose big idea was? “Blue”.

But despite the recession-|induced hourglass market, the luxury-brand sector is due a |correction. Consumers, even the well-off and wedged-up ones, will be making more discerning choices. They will look for more information and richer, fuller engagement to support those choices. The brands that thrive will be the ones that walk the talk not just the catwalk.

Gerry Moira is the chairman and director of creativity at Euro RSCG London