Mrs Balls-up

“Admiring advertising for its creativity is a bit like admiring Nazism for its cool uniforms,” Chris McEvoy wrote recently, and even though I’ve worked in the ad industry for virtually my entire salaried career*, it’s awfully tempting to agree with him.

“The advertising industry is a soulless vortex that sucks up all the creativity it can find into its gluttonous maw,” he continued, “then spews forth a bilious froth of contempt into the willing mouths of kneeling consumers”. I happen to think that advertising can play a positive role in society and culture — I did write an entire doctoral thesis on the role of advertising in nation-building in post-apartheid South Africa — but all too often, the ad industry demonstrates a spectacular lack of anything resembling ethics or a sense of responsibility to the public at which it aims its messages.

Case in point being the National Skirt Extension Project, a campaign which as it happens, demonstrates, with extraordinary clarity and focus, everything that is wrong with the ad industry.

Only the truly dof were ever taken in by this campaign, which purported to represent the desire of a group of concerned citizens to introduce a level of modesty to the signs on public toilets. Everybody else sat back and waited for some advertiser to take credit for it. Of course, all the cynics were right, and it was indeed an ad campaign, the product of fevered, presumably drug-fuelled minds at DDB. I just don’t think that anybody, in their wildest dreams, would have suspected that it would be Mrs Ball’s Chutney of all brands. Tsitsi Dhlamini, DDB business director, said: “We wanted to see numbers and we got them. Thousands of people went on to the site. The comments were hysterical. Some people went berserk; others were outraged.”

According to one dimension of analysis, the National Skirt Extension Project was a spectacular success — 360 000 website hits, 45 000 mentions on Google, 6 000 phone calls, 300 blogs in 23 countries and about 10 000 emails is no mean feat. Those are truly impressive figures; I’d love to be involved in a campaign that can boast numbers like that.

But did this campaign sell any chutney? More importantly, did it prompt you to think warm and fuzzy thoughts about Mrs Ball’s?

Dhlamini explained: “Certain things don’t need to be changed and shouldn’t be changed if there is nothing wrong with it. And it is the same with Mrs Ball’s. There is no need to change just for the sake of changing. Mrs Ball’s has been uncompromised since 1856 and won’t change. Brands keep reinventing themselves. So we decided to turn it on its head to say Mrs Ball’s won’t change. It doesn’t need to change. It has the same hexagonal bottle and the same recipe and it won’t change. It is going against the grain of a lot of messages out there.”

Um, ja. Ok. Whatever. The South African public, just prior to the most significant election since 1994, was really, really worried about the possibility of changes to the Mrs Ball’s recipe or packaging.

Mrs Ball’s “campaign consultant” — whatever that is — Brian Rea, said the campaign was “virtually a state secret”. “Only a select few knew what the origins of the campaign was. It was a great success as it created a huge buzz.”

Ah, buzz. That’s all it is about, really. Let’s piss off the public for fun! Let’s stir up yet more anger! Let’s think up the stupidest campaign we possibly can and turn it into a national talking point!

Here are a couple of the most salient reasons for hating this campaign:

1. Bathrooms and food??? I am sorry, but chutney — chutney! — and public toilets do not make for a comfortable semiotic juxtaposition. Especially since, for me at least, Mrs Balls is comfort food, something to accompany bobotie or roast chicken. Not pine-scented air freshener. In fact, Mrs Balls and public toilets in the same thought makes me feel quite ill.

2. The association between the brand and the campaign felt forced. The reason nobody suspected that Mrs Balls would be involved was that nobody in their right mind would associate Mrs Balls with this kind of stunt. When the brand behind this campaign was finally announced, people were mystified. If it had been Axe, which at least gets applied in bathrooms, and smells a bit like pine-scented air freshener, I’d buy the reasoning; this campaign was something a 16-year-old boy might come up with.

3. Nobody was worried that the recipe for Mrs Balls might be changed in the first place. So the entire premise of the campaign was contrived.

4. The advertisers deliberately misled the public for their own selfish ends. At a time when public trust in business is low, it seems madness to embark on a campaign that sought to create a national problem that never existed. Advertisers that are dishonest with the public will be punished, sooner or later.

5. The campaign completely undermined the brand. A friend of mine — who doesn’t work in the ad industry (she’s a completely cynical acerbic lawyer) — told me that one of the reasons the campaign bothered her was that it wasn’t the sort of thing Mrs Balls would do. “She’s a sweet old lady in an apron,” she argued. “She wouldn’t lie to the public.”

Sweet old reliable, unchanging, Mrs Ball — uncompromised since 1856 — is now a lying, cheating slag who makes bathroom jokes to get a rise out of people. She probably wears those trashy leopard-print sequinned tops they’re selling this season at Queenspark and hangs out at grab-a-granny day at Keegan’s.

The custodians of one of South Africa’s best-loved, most trusted brands, have squandered that trust.

This campaign is so spectacularly misguided, so strategically off-bat, that one is tempted to offer an award to the agency just for persuading the client to run with an idea that was probably developed in complete isolation of an actual brief (come up with the idea, then find a client to sell it to). If they do win a Loerie — and they probably will — I hope it’s for persuading the Mrs Ball’s brand manager to sign off on this.

As for McEvoy, he claimed to have been genuinely intrigued, initially at least, by the half-page ad which appeared in the Sunday Times, and was disappointed by reports that Unilever was behind it. “So what could have been anything will turn out to be just another stupid ad. How disappointing. And just for building me up, then bringing me down, I promise not to buy whatever they’re selling.”

And that’s the problem here, DDB and Unilever. Being in the ad industry doesn‘t give you the automatic right to mess with the public. Because they just might mess with you back.