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How do you know when outrage against bankers is really real? When you read about it in normally right wing papers like the Daily Mail or the Sun?  No.  You know when something has gone from the margins to the mainstream when it is embraced by popular commercial culture. And last night I saw a fantastic example of this.

The market, lets remember, has no morality – it will sell anything it can.  Profit maximisation is all that is hard wired and pre-programmed into it. In this single minded cause it will c-opt and appropriate the icons of the left like Che Guevara, Lenin or Gorbachev to flog t-shirts, vodka or Burberry.  It likes us to feel we are being a bit daring – still radical but oh so chic.

Sometimes, and its not often, it will attack its own side.  Strongbow do just this in one of their latest adverts. It starts with a pre battle scene on a windswept hilltop like Gladiators or Braveheart but the ‘army’ are modern tradesman and businessmen. The ‘general’ walks between them reminding them why they are here – to raise their flagging spirits before the battle ahead. The roofers are there to give shelter to our families; the gas fitters to bring us warmth.  He turns to the bankers – and says “you are because  ….” He can’t think of a reason. Someone in the dense ranks shouts ‘sod off’.  There are more shouts to “sod off” and the general ways the bankers away.  The bankers are turfed out of the lines of  real workers to loud boos and one last responding cry of “sod off”.  The pay off line is “Bowtime – hard earned”.  You can watch it here.

The calculation in the ad agency and the company will have been that few bankers drink Strongbow so they can afford to be offended. But the advert, they hope, would appeal to just about everyone else who works hard and deserves their reward – unlike the fat cat bonus bandits of the City. The creators of the advert will have done their homework before releasing it; they will have  researched attitudes to the rich and bankers, they will have focused grouped  the ideas and tested different versions of the advert.  The advert appears only because they know people are outraged and are tapping into this anger to sell a few more pints of their sweet apple and alcohol drink. And of course they do it for one reason; to earn more money.  The executives at Strongbow and their agency will be amongst the top earners in the country.  Perhaps not as rich as the bankers but in the top 5% certainly.  Do they work any harder – do they add more to society than the bankers? Do they deserve their Bowtime?  It’s debatable.

Writing all this has made me thirsty and for some strange reason I fancy a pint of Strongbow.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.