Into the Advertising Abyss: Supermarket Wars

It might be the two years I spent studying BComms, but more likely it's my recent overdosing on (the frankly brilliant) Mad Men, that makes me feel so (unjustly) qualified to form opinions on the advertisements assailing me from supermarket aisles as I groggily and somewhat unevolvedly hunt for the essentials; juice, cheese, and for the love-of-shiny something caffeinated. This week, I'm looking at what some major campaigns are trying to convince you to buy this week, and how they might be considered to have somewhat cocked it up.

I'll start with the alarming. Woolworths' giant cardboard cut-outs of Margaret Fulton are an unkind thing to have jump out at a sleep-deprived and hungover undergraduate on a Sunday afternoon. I'm not entirely sure what this campaign is supposed to do except make children cry out in fear. I wasn't equipped with a ubiquitous cameraphone, but here's a much smaller sample image of Our Lady of Cookbooks. If I recall correctly, the only difference is the cutout is lifesized, and I think she may be wielding some cut of meat like the alpha Zombie at the front of the horde.

(frightening)

I'm as big a fan of Fulton's recipes as the next child of the Australian 1980s. For some reason, however, I had thought that she had passed peacefully away in her sleep at some point in the past few years. This is something I was genuinely a touch sad about, she seems a nice lady who really enjoys baking and who won't sue me for stating that her cut-out alter ego frankly terrifies me. This leads to the situation where this new campaign unfortunately makes me think "Tsk, Woolworths, using the re-animated corpse of Margaret Fulton to sell yourselves as fresh. Look at those cold, dead, betrayed eyes". Or it would, if my brain wasn't too busy quivering in fear and trying to hide behind my liver from what may be a scout send ahead from the apparently oncoming zombie hordes.

As a side note, I'm genuinely quite pleased Margaret Fulton is not dead. As is, I think, the organic supplier whose trademark "Honest to Goodness" is the subject of proceedings against Woolworths, since this is the phrase emblazoned across cardboard Maggie. The supplier claims it's a rip off of his trademark - Woolworths claim that it's a commonly used phrase which they should absolutely be allowed to whore out in to support their claim that they are fresher, healthier, more honest than their frankly identical competitors.

Aldi is back in the game as well, setting itself up as the third party for Australian shoppers with a campaign where they ask "What will you spend the your Aldi savings on?". I found the TV spot for this when I was looking for a copy of the poster to link you to, somewhat bewildered that the answer appears to be "A water feature".

The video merely confirms what I thought was an interpretation-fail by me ("no one could seriously be answering this question with water feature, maybe it's about family-time or purchasing small children on the internet or something. Wait, what the?")-but the answer is, depressingly enough, a water feature. They're presumably not saving up for water-feature number 2, or they would have remembered to bring their greenbags instead of buying the plastic ones instore.

I'm not sure what kind of market research went into this, but I get the impression it's founded in the notion that Australians can be convinced to change their shopping habits over Freudianesque fountain-envy, a point not-so-subtly rammed home as the non-Aldi-shopping neighbour in the piece holds a wilty looking, much smaller garden hose as he gazes covetously at his neighbour's spurty barrel-fountain. I think we're no longer talking about Jamie-Durie-esque decorative garden design at this point, although perhaps phallic competition has always been at the heart of Aussie garden design. Crap. That thought, and distant memories of Gardening Australia and Burke's Backyard are probably now going to cause me to wake screaming in fear at some point.

Also, I know virtually every wholesome Aussie ad runs a bingley jingle as background to their smiley family of actors, but that one is particularly grating.

It's probably a moot point at this stage, but does Aldi even sell water features?

Just once I'd like to see a "look what you can spend your savings on" campaign that doesn't result in the answer being some entirely boring unnecessary consumeristic status anxiety piece of crap. Why not have neighbour A's kids having a college fund by dint of the twenty-five cents Mum and Dad have saved buying Aldi brand fish-fingers? Why not show them getting mail from the family they're sponsoring in Darfur with the extra cash they have now that their bog-roll costs less? Hell, why not have a suite of adult escorts pull into the driveway in the last frame to show that a year's worth of purchases at a supermarket that does low-budget remarkably well gives you more money to spend on areas where you really shouldn't cut costs?

I don't know. Sometimes I think advertisers just aren't trying any more. Insert wholesome looking family + at least one cute child + tacky jingle + soft-focus homey backgrounds (kitchen/garden). Attach interchangeable brand, sell to highest bidder. Branding Aldi as a cheaper alternative - that's a reminder, not a rebrand. Woolworth's fresh food people imaging is also not really improved by continued attempts to reshape and redevelop it, particularly where they've tried (somewhat unsuccessfully, in my view) to attach another Australian brand to themselves as a kind of quality stamp. They'd almost both be better reverting to shouty community television ads where they just hope your brains will fall out your ears in a mushy goo trickle, and you'll end up craving whatever brand of snackfood it is that is exclusively available at one of the nearest major supermarkets. A tip, though- just try to be alert, and not alarmed, by the cardboard zombie Fultons.

The Surly Valentine

When did this become a thing, this wide-eyed tacky embrace of all things coupledom for St. Valentines' day in Australia? Like Easter and Christmas, it seems to come on earlier and stronger every year. Even my beloved Aldi, the cheap eurotrashy supermarket that keeps me in mushrooms, broccoli and gluhwein while letting me keep my labour in the lower paid community sector, is, two weeks out from the supposed big day, offering chocolate roses. It begins to look as though a total boycott of the festival of mush is entirely impossible. Is there nowhere outside the curmudgeonly cave that is safe from kitsch heartshapes, pinks and reds and cliched sentiment?

It is beyond unlikely that I will be spending February 14th entwined with some other soul, making mushy faces in some overcrowded restaurant, gushing over something Hallmark finds a romantic sentiment, and pretending that every cliched motif of romanticism is somehow a sweet and unique expression of something genuine, as opposed to a crassly commercial, over-packaged and manufactured emotion. Of course, your Curmudgeon would say that. My history around these situations is somewhat fraught.

Growing up in Australia in the 1990s, Valentines Day was a concept as foreign as Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Halloween. There were always going to be a couple of people who embraced the concept, but we never exchanged cards at school or really focussed on the day as a calendar event. When I was fourteen, I contemplated organising a Valentines' day gift in a fit of tacky adolescence, but decided instead to dispense chocolate frogs to other girls at my single sex school who did not have single stems of roses to carry from class to class all day (P.S girls who did have roses, please note they *will* fit into a locker, stop with the conspicuous smuggery). That became a fun tradition as, adolescents being adolescents, there was always someone in need of chocolate and cheering up on this day designed to remind us all that, OMG, the perfect state of being is to be permanently attached to someone else.

As we got older, it became the Anti-Valentines outdoor cinema night, or the Lonely Hearts (fuck you, Valentines Day) bar crawl. It was a paean and ode to our youth, our freedom, and the city we found ourselves in. Healthy sense of irony engaged - no one was particularly bitter about being single, but nor were we in a hurry to hide at home from the smug couple hordes. We believed this night should belong to us as well.

I haven't always been as single on Valentines day as I will be this year. I too have had the gushy Valentines Day experience of the cringeworthily cutesy young love variety. I forget what we did, but I recall he wrote me a poem and we had what could somewhat unoriginally be described as a magical evening. Melbourne in February puts on decent weather, and it felt like we had all the time in the world. It was coffee, sunshine, our own little world - but then, when you're a little bit in love with someone every day is like that. The crowds and the conspicuous coupledom of the holiday of lurve neither adds nor detracts, because that would involve peeking outside the adolescent-hormone bubble of each other and noticing that the rest of the world continues to turn.

The relationship was pretty seriously on the rocks when we shared a Valentines Day which involved a teddy bear holding a heart, a single rose, and some chocolate, the scatterbomb approach to human engagement if I've ever seen it. I was never sure if he covered all of the traditional bases because we had just gotten back together after a break-up, if everything was half-price (since we'd missed the actual day out of a combination of busyness and apathy), or if he genuinely didn't realise that the poem he'd written me a year before, the notes he used to leave scattered around my room, actually meant something, whereas a bear saying "I wuv you" means someone's suffered a frontal lobotomy. We had stopped putting anything of ourselves into what we were doing, and we were ready to settle for tokenistic and expected.

The curmudgeon comes out here - these things were somewhat meaningless because they had nothing to do with who either of us were as people. They involved a transaction in which no thought was required, to purchase a message that was made trite and somewhat meaningless by mass-production. This is not an aesthetic or consumeristic point - I would not have liked the idea of these gifts any more if they were expensive, quite the contrary - the only reason I had any time for them at all was because, despite everything, I cared for the person proffering them. It was the fact that thoughtfulness ceased to become a part of the situation. A plush heart to say "I love you" is about as meaningful as a fill-in-the-blanks eulogy from a cereal packet.

Since then I've largely avoided VD in all its forms. If I like someone, I don't need the excuse to show my affection. I do hereby pledge, however, that I will never buy someone a plush animal wielding a heart in cold blood. Maybe this year I'll distribute chocolate frogs to my friends or leave a thoughtful note somewhere to be found, or I'll go back to my favourite haunts and let my city be my Valentine for one more year. Being a complete and solitary human being on Valentines Day, despite the social pressures of monogamy etcetera, is something of a relief. This year I'm curling up with a volume of Charlie Brooker's articles, listening to Van Halen and not giving a fuck what anyone thinks. I recommend it.