The Third Leader: Sales pitch

Big news: women, it seems, prefer advertisements to be peopled by models of a normal size, as this helps them to relate rather better to the articles offered. Well, well. This sounds like an idea that the industry should take out of the parking lot and give a spin before running it up the flagpole.

There is a bit about already: those Dove adverts featuring Real Women, for example; and now, I read, one of the sportswear firms has signed up a pale male skinny hip-hopper, and, as you will have noticed, Marks & Spencer has started using comedians, which may be an irony too far.

No, what the research appears to indicate is that the punters want adverts saying what's on the tin and featuring normal, conventionally attractive people, a description which all comedians, supermodels and musicians would be proud to reject on at least one count.

The time has come, the people are saying, to abandon the knowing, the artful and the obscure; to return to the Glorious Golden Age of Advertising. We want kindly bespectacled men in white coats pointing to blackboards and explaining in simple terms, with the odd long scientific name, about the solution to night starvation, stubborn stains, unpleasant odours and where the yellow went. We want smiling mothers and dimpled children lisping about washing-up liquid, watches that keep going despite being strapped to outboard motors, gloved hands showing that the chocolate melts in your mouth, car adverts we can understand first time.

Remember the pitch for the old Rover sedan? "Luxurious without ostentation". That's more like it. JWT, TBWA, S&S: Call me!