Advertise here from only 40 baht per week
to hull
and back
Mags Meanderings:
From Som Tam
To Mushy Peas
christmas is coming?
Imagine if you will a small boy, about 8 years old, playing
with his friend. They seem to be inseparable, watching
TV together, travelling on a bus, doing all the things that
friends do. Except that the friend is a real live penguin
named Monty, who, like all penguins of a certain age, is
becoming broody for a mate.
Fortunately the young boy is street wise for his age.
Recognising a love sick penguin when he sees one, he
surprises Monty with a little lady friend for Christmas.
And as Monty bonds with his soul mate Mabel it becomes
clear that the two penguins are not real at all, but just
toys.
By this time you are either going all gooey eyed or
reaching for the bottle. Maybe you are also wondering
what the story was all about.
Well wonder no more, for it is the latest John Lewis
Christmas advert, which very quickly went viral, so if
you haven’t yet seen it you can - if you must - catch up
online.
This is just one of the latest batch of seasonal ads in
the growing trend for seasonal ads which don’t actually
advertise products. Instead they aim to tug at the heart
strings and evoke that ‘feel good’ factor which will draw
shoppers to those magical emporiums of Christmas
dreams, (or at least to visit their websites.) And to be
fair the John Lewis ‘feel good’ ad did at least, either by
accident or design, result in them selling out of some
very expensive toy penguins in no time.
Of course other retailers ads are available, including
front runners in the gooey seasonal ad market Marks
and Spencer and Boots. In fact these two, along with
John Lewis, form the top three Christmas ads in an
online vote for the best of the 2014 bunch.
But when the M and S advance viewing landed in my E
mail inbox last week it was quite a relief that the laptop
battery expired half way through, curtailing the vision
of women pretending to be fairies and flying around
snowy rooftops in a rather wooden fashion, trailing
fairy dust in their wake. True - a few products could be
glimpsed if you watched closely enough, including the
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from just 350 baht
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clothes of the fairies in question, which to be honest
were not suited to the weather. Clearly M and S daren’t
risk going the whole hog like John Lewis, which given
the competition these days is maybe wise.
Boots meanwhile have no such qualms - concentrating
on a little story about going home to family for Boxing
Day, with no product placement in sight - not even a
penguin.
Maybe I should stop giving my E mail address to almost
every national chain of retailers that I use and save
myself a lot of angst!
But no, it is almost impossible now - even in Hull - to get
by without online shopping and store points cards, and
in any case ads on TV are unavoidable so they get you
one way or the other. I just wish they would stick to the
point and stop pretending they are something they’re
not.
The moral to this story is that however annoying those
loudspeaker bearing pickups are on the sois of Hua Hin,
be thankful that they quickly pass you by.
You may of course be planning to immerse yourself
even more fully in festive celebrations by popping up
to Bangkok for a few days. If so this weeks’ word could
prove useful in Patpong. No-one will understand it
except you, but it could be an interesting ice breaker.
‘Ecdysiast’. According to Wiki this means an erotic dancer
who removes their clothes as a form of entertainment.
Also known as a stripper.
17
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