Worth telling twice

AD BREAKDOWN
The Magazine's Review of Advertising

All quiet

The advert: Argos - comic scenes in a department store and a petrol station

The breakdown: In these days of prices being slashed, High Street institutions closing down and general doom and gloom it's almost heartening to see adverts with lavish production values. And especially from the likes of Argos.

Sure, Argos is still running its "pictures of things you might want, superimposed on a red background with a big price label" adverts, punctuating some TV programmes at 15 minute intervals. But alongside these come two more ambitious adverts which stand out from the crowd.

One shows a beautifully acted and directed scene in a department store in which a variety of unctuous assistants over-wrap a tiny present, adding bows, boxes, fake snow and a wax seal. A lot of trouble has been taken in the making - there's a large cast, and intricate staging.

The customer's frustration at not being allowed to take the gift would be funny, in fact the whole thing would be very funny, had there not been a rather large fly in this perfumed oinment. We've already laughed at this exact scene when we saw Rowan Atkinson and Alan Rickman enact it in Love Actually.

In fact it was much, much funnier there because Rickman's character was under time pressure to buy a present for his secretary before his wife turned up. Here, despite the ambition - and the no-doubt pricey voiceover from a mellifluous Stephen Fry - the clear recycling of an idea ultimately is too much of a distraction for the advert to succeed.

The other advert in the series shares the loving attention. An assistant in a remote rundown petrol station biding his time as the clock ticks down to midnight on Christmas Day. Suddenly he is deluged with a rash of panicked customers who storm his shop, and like locusts frenziedly grab anything they can get their hands on, stripping his shelves and even his Christmas decorations.

He stands bewildered, as they dash back to their cars. The advert then cuts to a family unwrapping a variety of motoring-based gifts - sponges, wheel trims, windscreen wipers. Fry, again, advises to avoid last-minute Christmas rushes by ordering online.

It's beautifully made, but again slightly let down by the premise - both Friends and Men Behaving Badly have explored doing last-minute shopping at the petrol station, though to the advert's credit, the all-male cliche is avoided with women joining in the throng.

Some critics have said that the adverts don't actually give potential customers any reason to go to Argos - the adverts don't show any products that you can buy. But if they are abstract, that is probably compensated for by the "price label" adverts. And in any case they will be more effective than Richard E Grant pretending to be a rocker.

The Blogger's verdict: Peter Kenny [see internet links] says the adverts are "works of some cunning".

"[Argos's] smeary catalogues, hobbit ballpoints and forms; the baleful queues eyeing the struggles of temporary seasonal staff with increasing tetchiness... it's what British Christmases are made of. These ads, however, are brilliant. For of course focusing on the actual purgatorial horror of the Argos shopping experience is clearly not a starter.

"Instead they have the sheer gall to ridicule alternative shopping options. So we have the idea that you might like your presents wrapped. The absurdity! Or that the only possible alternative to cyber faffing is to raid a petrol station at midnight on Christmas Eve. It works though, by thunder. The casting is excellent, and the colours all drained of vibrancy. And perfectly topped off with the Elizabeth Duke twinkle of Stephen Fry's voiceover. One of the best examples of turning a weakness into a strength you'll see."

Ad Breakdown is compiled by Giles Wilson