Valentines as propaganda in Uzbekistan
Troubling news reached us this week from Uzbekistan, where the BBC reported that Valentine’s Day had been cancelled . With the country struggling to shield its culture from Western influence and with tensions still simmering over the alleged involvement of the UK and US in 2004/5 civilian protests, this was the latest in a series of moves that have divided the public.
Where Valentines Day used to be traditionally marked with a free concert by Uzbek pop legend Rayhan, now the nation was being encouraged to spend the day celebrating the 16th century Moghul emperor, Babur, who shared the same birth date. Many were unimpressed, one student complaining “It's a shame that instead of going to a concert we'll have to waste a couple of hours at some tedious event the university will put on”.
Pressed for comment, the ‘Department for Enlightenment and Promoting Values’, which I can assure you is a very real department, simply explained that there was a policy "not to celebrate holidays that are alien”. But perhaps this was no national pride stoking political gimmick after all. Perhaps the department had simply taken one look at the Clinton Cardisation of the West and decided to nip things in the bud while they still could.
A cheap as you can get Valentines card
Look! Ha ha! What idiots!! What were they thinking? Idiots!! A 7p Valentine’s day card with SMART PRICE written on it?! Who did they think would buy that? Who thought of this? Stupid, stupid and stupid.
This was the main thrust of most of the articles and commentary written about Asda’s Valentines Day card. And there were a lot of them, the story featuring in hundreds of publications up and down the land. Yet surely that was the whole point?
We’ve seen and heard such public reactions to stunts before. In fact, it tends to happen every time Michael O’Leary of Ryanair talks. This is a man who is seemingly incapable of talking to a journalist without conducting a simultaneous brainstorm with himself in which he gives birth to a pulsing litter of harebrained cost saving schemes that probably flout the most basic rules of the European Human Rights Convention. Yet, hysterical reactions to such popular suggestions as making passengers pay to use the toilet serve brilliantly in underlining Ryanair’s fundamental business proposition: “we’re as cheap as you can get”.
Here Asda have pulled off a similar masterstroke. It is unlikely they sold too many of their “Smart price cards”, but who cares when they have so successfully drawn the nations attention to the fact that - “we’re as cheap as you can get”.
Valentines in the news
What is love? One might think the Valentines Day news might provide some clues. Except that, in the desperation for fresh new vantage points, the content never seems to amount to more than a reinforcing of the very newspaper stereotypes from which the exercise is meant to be a distraction.
In The Sun we learnt that Lady Gaga had dressed up as Vlad the Impaler to impress a new beau. But at least there was some vague story to the gratuitous tosh. The Daily Mail on the other hand simply belched out a never-ending sequence of anodyne non-articles featuring famous names and little else by way of content (“Scarlett Johansson enjoys a Valentine's boat trip”). This was unsurprising - such industrial scale mindlessness has seen them recently usurp the NYT as the most visited paper on the web after all. They did manage one surprise though – a Valentine’s day article about two gay men breaking the record for kissing (They kissed for 2-days) that didn’t appear to feature the faintest hint of homophobia. Order was soon restored in the comments though: “I am prepared to tolerate these people but doing this kind of thing in public is going too far! Horrible!”. How very tolerant indeed.
The Telegraph , knowing their readers tend to spend most of their time on horseback, chose to wow them with the news that Google were introducing a special doodle for the day. Which at least was more out of the mould than the Guardian’s plea to ‘occupy’ Valentine’s Day and reclaim love from the card sellers. And as for The Times, their take isn’t featured in this lazy, quickly hashed piece of online un-journalism. Their content is trapped behind a firewall, you see. They no longer belong here. Thanks Rupert, your article was almost certainly the most insipid of the lot anyway.
Valentines as propaganda in market research
No, really! This week we received emails from our friends over at Brainjuicer , the market research agency who put measuring emotional response at the heart of what they do. We were informed of a covert plan to “send Millward Brown [their great rivals] a Valentine's card, to thank them for their bravery in publicly acknowledging emotion rather than persuasion is what drives long-term brand success.” We were asked to add our signatures so that the card would serve as a thank-you from the creative industry as a whole.
Then on Tuesday, Juicer extraordinaire, Will Goodhand, was despatched on a daunting mission to deliver the card in person. The accompanying film begins with our hero cheerfully singing love songs that feature ingenious puns on Millward Brown testing metrics, but the tension soon mounts as he arrives at rival HQ. His nervous yet steely determination seems more in keeping with a grandiose Greenpeace stunt against despicable corporate evil than an argument over quantitative testing. But any trepidation is soon allayed with the news that the man who will be greeting him is called Andy Truslove. Trust – Love!! What were the chances of that!? …The staff of Millward Brown seemed either confused or nonplussed by the exercise but Andy handles the guerrilla intrusion with good grace.
Victory to Brainjuicer? Not quite. Yesterday, Millward Brown Executive Vice President, Nigel Hollis, struck back:
“Millward Brown pioneered the measurement of emotion in advertising decades before Brainjuicer appeared on the scene, and has championed the longer-term effects of advertising for almost as long. Valentine’s Day is all about attraction, love and affection. Now we all know that Brainjuicer loves Millward Brown, but isn’t it odd that it doesn’t recognize those emotions in its own pre-test? That seems a bit remiss of the company if it really wants to understand how people react to an ad.”
Ouch! One all! We look forward to round two…
3M’s helpful Valentines ad for feckless Collins
Back in the glory days of advertising, men were portrayed as gallant, chivalrous suitors who would perform steel-wilting acts of romantic bravery at the slightest whiff of a commercial entity fabricated in the middle ages as part of an ingenious ploy to sell cards. And all because the Lady loved Milk Tray. Now advertising tends to portray men as feckless Colins who would have already been consigned to the evolutionary dustbin by now were in not for the existence of miraculous all-in-one cleaning products that somehow leave the house gleaming by the time she gets back with the kids.
But this year advertising gave those witless drones their chance to strike back. You know 3M? That’s right, they’re guys that make post-it notes and all of those other products that are the result of a core competence in chemical engineering. Well, seizing upon the universal truth that girlfriends are always leaving annoying, nagging notes ALL OVER the place (women, eh?), they produced an educational film just in time for the most romantic day of the year that instructed men on how they could hoist the girls with their own papery petard.
The film ends with an ultimate pay-off, fading to white in what is clearly a crafty little reference to ‘death’, acting as a crafty little reference to death. Simply buy a small square pack of only partly adhesive paper and you’ll get laid! Score! Get in!! But why stop there? There’s a reprise. Why not make office stationary the entire source of the romantic experience? The film concludes with a selection of themed post-it dispensers that would all leave all but the frostiest of ice queens rapturous in approval at their man’s gift buying judgement. So there it is. Valentine’s Day solved. And for those that remain unconvinced just look at the comments below! Take SamanthaSzmanda85 for instance: “everybody knows that women LOVE_ post-its!”. For the record, Samantha categorically does not work for 3M. There you have it, men. Vindication!
About the author:
James is a strategist at Mother. He has a distinct taste in jumpers and has more hair on is head than whole strategy team put together. Remarkably he is the official World Monopoly champion of champions, an accolade he’ll claim for 25 years until the next tournament in 2022. Fact.
