Marks & Spencer’s Bottom Comes Top In ‘Ads That Make News’ Survey

Marks & Spencer’s recent advertising campaign, the first in the company’s history to include TV adverts, included the most talked-about advert in the national press from July-September. This was revealed in Propeller Marketing Communications’ latest “Ads That Make News” survey, which revealed that the retailer’s adverts received more than three times the coverage of the winner during the last quarter – the Berlei poster campaign featuring tennis player Anna Kournikova.

The initial cause of interest in the campaign stemmed from the advertiser’s traditional shunning of TV adverts, coupled with the recent, well-publicised decline in Marks & Spencer’s popularity with consumers. However, the fact that one of the TV adverts, and the accompanying poster campaign, challenged the media’s idea of female beauty by featuring a size 16 woman running up a hill with no clothes on, declaring “I’m normal”, doubtless helped sustain the column inches.

Martin Loat, managing director of Propeller, said, “The new campaign was designed to answer the critics in a bold and controversial way and ultimately it became a victim of its own success. The huge amount of media interest in the campaign stemmed from a supposedly Great British institution coming up with such a radical campaign.”

Debates about whether the model featured was actually a size 14 or a size 16 led into debates about whether women seeing the advert would regard the model featured as ‘normal’ and further into the question of whether the campaign gave the impression that M&S only catered for larger ladies and ponderings on the nation’s favourite knicker-provider using knicker-less models. In addition, despite having had the advertisement vetted by religious groups before launch, billboards featuring the rear view of the naked model still triggered complaints and vandalism in some areas, causing the store to withdraw the posters from some areas.

There probably weren’t many debates about the attractiveness of the model featured in the runner-up advert. Persil’s washing-up liquid ad, featuring supermodel Naomi Campbell donning rubber gloves with the strapline “What does it take to get me into rubber”. This was no great shakes in the originality department, except perhaps in the combination of the old fashioned “scantily- clad woman draped across the bonnet” approach to car advertising used in a household cleaner campaign. Nevertheless it attracted enough coverage to ensure its place in the survey.

Runners up included Smirnoff’s Che Guevara advert, which mainly gained coverage because the photographer who created the now iconic image, who is also a communist, objected to the use of the picture, not only without his permission, but in order to promote a capitalist company. Other adverts gaining enough coverage to make the survey were Guinness’ award winning Horses campaign, the police recruitment adverts which asked famous people whether they could cope with what the police have to do and Pizza Hut, which launched its slogan on a rocket.

The Daily Telegraph was given the dubious honour of being the “most ad- friendly newspaper”, having written about adverts in no less than 40 articles from July to September. Well, you couldn’t write about Big Brother for the whole of the silly season, could you?

Propeller Marketing Communications: 0207 636 6300

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