Advertising: The Pru is well versed

Why don't advertisers hire poets? They subsidise the other arts hugely. I'd reckon the money advertising puts into the fine and applied arts – obviously it keeps all the film trades going – is as much again as the Government and the Arts Council combined.

They used to use poets; all the Patience Strong set scribbled away for print ads between the wars. Did the Victorian greats do sponsored verses? I don't know, but poetry – proper rhyming, sentimental poetry – was once a building block of popular culture, like fag-ends from the Bible and Shakespeare.

Prudential has been bold enough to run a 12-poem, 12-treatment campaign on the theme of growing old – and it's really come off.

The poems are well chosen; it's almost all fairly recent stuff, "accessible" not difficult. But absolutely not Patience Strong either. There's one by Fran Landesman about family photo-graphs, nicely illustrated with poignant snaps drifting down a river. Another about the cost of teenage children, with a boy showering silver as he walks across a train station concourse. There's a transvestite in 1930s drag declaring she'll be outrageous when she's old. She'll wear purple, make up for the sobriety of her youth ... and learn to spit. A sleeping old man dreams about his Armani suit, his hip-hop CDs and his "Honda Porsche". He's a Last Chance Trendy.

Roger McGough, a genuinely popular poet for at least 40 years now, has a piece called "Joy to Be Old" that's actually rather bleak, with its constant refrain of "The dog dead and the car sold". On it goes: "Death can't be cajoled, there's no rewinding the spool ... so get out and get arseholed." There's stuff about bus passes and warm libraries and, of course, there's a park bench; it's self-dedicated to Raymond Lindley 1935, "Fine man you are". It's a territory somewhere between Scaffold and Alan Bennett. "If your dog's on his last legs, get a plan from the Pru!" they say.

You're not supposed to talk about death in advertising (unless it's a "don't" campaign). You're not supposed to talk about ageing, unless you've got the magic bullet for it (L'Oréal etc). But the Pru knows it's talking to a more literate target market, one that's familiar with poetry, and it's talking to them in a grown-up way. It's a clever choice for the Pru because it's playing to its strength – that it's as anchored in British life as, say, Radio 4.

Peter@sru.co.uk