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Friday, 8 June 2012

Excuse me, are you taking the ****? Or are you a genius?

She who is a damn sight smarter than me is a great fan of Harvey Nichols, so this postcard came to her yesterday.

It made me laugh out loud.

The line runs "Try to contain your excitement". Very clever.

I imagine it was put together by some young thing just dying to be creative and win an award from people who give each other awards for just that.

I then had a brief discussion with the radiant Chloe. "Do you think this is in extremely bad taste - or very good?"

We agreed that it is probably both, but she didn't have the benefit of actually seeing it.

When the aforementioned She who is a damn sight smarter saw it she said this, more or less:

"Harvey Nichols have a lot of  older customers maybe in their 40's who want to be on trend but are really quite conventional. They will hate this."

I'd add to that something just as important: the older customers are the ones with the money.

Chloe is only 23, and not rich (stick with me, kid) and it is almost impossible to shock me, so we don't really represent the audience.

The model is dreadfully thin, poor thing. And where has her derrière slipped to, I wonder?

Nevertheless I would be quite pleased to have come up with the joke. But wiser people than me - like John Caples - have commented on the dangers of humour.

What is really interesting is that no paper would run this ad, and the hypocrites who make millions from porn on the internet would never run it.

But that's another subject.


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