Peter York on Ads: Smooth, creamy, filling... And that's only the commercial

Mars

In early 1970s, American films, freed from the studio to real urban and suburban locations and apparently directed by people who were out of their heads, ordinary life looks particularly weird. Take something starring, say, Clint Eastwood or Burt Reynolds - it doesn't have to be arty - and focus on the background: the cars, buildings, clothes and the commuting crowds caught accurately as modern people but before mobiles, internet, fundamentalism, Aids or Will and Grace. The colours look just off - does Seventies film stock always bleach out? - the people look dreamy and the backgrounds look like hyper-realist paintings.

These aren't the thoughts you'd expect to have provoked by a Mars commercial. The Martian approach to advertising has been so formulaic, so iron-clad and engine-turned that you had to admire its consistency. Through decades of advertising fashion you could recognise a Mars commercial - like a Procter and Gamble one - from the first frame. You knew all the unities would be observed and you'd get a pack shot and a strap-line such as "helps you work, rest and play" at the end. You might see a cross-section showing the unique layering of chocolate, caramel and fudgey stuff that yielded such private pleasure. But you'd never see any of the beastliness showing up in 1970s Cadbury's Flake advertising. Cadbury's was just filthy English.

So when Mars come up with something dreamy-weird in that accidental early Seventies style you wonder whether they've let the cultural engineers loose in Hackettstown, New Jersey.

The new commercial is beautiful. A conventional young man - white shirtsleeves and tie - rejects the bus and walks to work from his verdant suburb to the city centre of Shining Oz Towers. He climbs over fences and walks through gardens. He picks his way over a giant car scrap-heap and strolls through container world, a fish processing factory and a barber's shop, up the fire escape of a white 1950s building and over the roof and on to the city where he buys a Mars from a street-shack and takes it up into his office. Close up you see he's got a fluffy upper lip.

The music is by an LA-based person called Sam Spiegel (sic) who's got lots of smart credits and hippety-hoppety links. But it sounds very 1972 with all its dippy lines about "wanting out". The strap-line's the utterly conventional "another way to make your day", but for all the 21st-century calculation and the film references, the retro message "find a different way to work" is at least a quarter way to paradise.

Peter@sru.co.uk