John Fanning on why ads can help relate the story of a nation’s psyche
The centre is collapsing all over the world, from Trump and Brexit to fascists in the European Parliament. Increasingly, anti-democratic politicians and even more extreme demagogues and autocrats are appearing ‘like frogs after rain’ in countries from Hungary to Brazil and from Italy to the Philippines.
Amid all the global gloom, the centre is still holding in Ireland. Economists, historians and political commentators will no doubt have their own theories why in spite of a prolonged and severe dose of austerity centre parties are still firmly in control; there is no sign of a far right emerging and although there has been an increase in support for disparate elements of the far left, there appears to be no immediate threat to the centre.
One explanation is that we were not tempted up the garden path of a delusional ‘great’ past like other countries conveniently ignoring that their ‘greatness’ was achieved with the help of rape, pillage and colonial exploitation. We did have a period of greatness, but at a distance of one and a half millennia it was too much of a stretch to provide the necessary catalyst.
WAVES OF ENTHUSIASM: Akzo Nobel hired Boys + Girls to create a video for Dulux Weathershield on three Irish sea swimmers. Shot at Myrtleville beach in Cork, ‘The Invincibles’ shares the thoughts of Tom Bermingham, Mairead Ni Mhaoileóin and Tom McCarthy, on why they swim year round.
Another explanation for our stoicism in the face of adversity is reflected in the country’s advertising since the recession. Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher and prominent public intellectual in the US in the 1960’s, who said “the medium is the message”, also wrote: “Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most fruitful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities”.
Now that we have reached the 10th anniversary of the Great Recession and given the immediate political and economic problems we are faced with it might be useful to conduct a preliminary investigation of what Irish advertising in the last decade can tell us about how we coped with a crisis that had a more traumatic effect on us than on most countries.
Emigration has been the most consistent theme of Irish advertising since God was a little boy – or, at least, since the advent of commercial television through RTE in the 1950’s, which exposed Ireland to the greater professionalism and sophistication of the overspill ads from our nearest and dearest. Irish advertising responded by starting to use market research to produce professional briefs and by investing in more seasoned TV and radio producers.
Prompted by research which showed that almost every household was affected by emigration, many memorable ads were produced, from Harp’s Sally O’Brien (and the way she might look at you) by Arks to the Peter Owens Aer Lingus ad with the Ennio Morricone score from The Mission, to the evocative ESB classic ‘Going Home’ with the haunting Dusty Springfield track, espousing ‘I think I’m going home to the things I learned so well… in my youth’.
Emigration has continued to feature in Irish advertising but it has been accompanied and sometimes incorporated into a second theme; community, kinship and celebration of the local. Once again, it is not difficult to find out why; advertisers regularly surveyed the public monitoring their hopes and fears, anxieties and aspirations and would have discovered a traumatised population circling the wagons and battening down the hatches.
All in support of GAA: Dublin footballer Bernard Brogan fronted for SuperValu. The grocery retailer has fought hard to grab consumer attention, along with the likes of AIB and Guinness.
The same was happening in other countries affected by the economic crisis. But where other countries retreated into sullen resentment, suspicion of foreigners and misguided dreams of making their country ‘great again’, we retreated to our local communities without resentment or suspicion and instead took pleasure as well as consolation in celebrating the local.
One of the most comprehensive attempts to chronicle the mood of the Irish public, as they tried to adjust to the changing economic conditions following the recession, is a series of national surveys commissioned by Bord Bia every year between 2012 and 2015. The studies were designed to guide the marketing efforts of Ireland’s food and drink businesses.
The main findings, consistent across the four years, show a people anxiously re-discovering the virtues of family friends and especially community, actively disavowing the materialist excesses of the pre-2008 era and still deeply suspicious of official institutions and business. Local communities; welcoming, generous, timeless, were critical in regaining confidence. Attitudes showed no sign of weakening, even in 2015 when for the first time since the recession 51 per cent of the population felt they were “doing well financially”’. It compares with only 16 per cent in 2014, 13 per cent in 2013 and a paltry eight per cent in 2012.
In the 2015 survey, just 17 per cent wanted to own more material goods compared to one in three answering the same question in Italy, 31 per cent in France and 22 per cent in Germany. The research concluded that one Irish characteristic was as strong as ever; the sense of collective kinship or meitheal, rallying around to help out neighbours in time of need.
Many businesses conducted their own research and arriving at the same conclusions directed their advertising agencies to reflect the changed mood in their marketing communications. Three main developments ensued. The first was packaging with a rush to include the face of a farmer, sometimes en famille, standing tall in the sedge. You could not escape the rural idyll in every supermarket aisle as austerity started to bite in the now mainly urban population. The second was a realisation that the GAA was the quintessential Irish community organisation.
The GAA had its deep roots in every parish and boasted impeccable nationalist credentials. It saw another stampede, with businesses as varied as SuperValu to Lidl, from AIB to Allianz and from Kellogg to Avonmore aligning themselves with the association in sponsorship and ad campaigns. Even the country’s largest stockbroker, Davy, emerged as a sponsor of Dalkey club, Cuala, twice winners of the Ireland club hurling championship in recent years.
The GAA Club Championships, an annual tournament for local clubs the length and breadth of the country, started in the early 1970’s but assumed much greater national prominence in the late 1990’s with regular TV coverage and a prestigious St Patrick’s Day final in Croke Park. A TV commercial for the GAA Club Championships recently ran ads which captured the essence of the intensely local ethos of the games and included the line: “When we show our colours we also show much more than support, we show where we’re from and what we stand for, we represent our families, our community and our club.”
Perhaps the most bizarre manifestation was German discounters Lidl and Aldi ‘hard at it’ at the Ploughing Championships in a bid to be more Irish than the Irish themselves. However, the campaign which I believe best exemplifies the Irish reaction to the recession was a two and a half minute video by Boys + Girls for Dulux Weathershield Paint a few years ago.
In an effort to highlight a product designed to withstand the vagaries of the Irish weather, the film features a group of all-year round swimmers from West Cork and the metaphor is obvious with the swimmers representing the brand as they withstand the wild Atlantic elements. But what gives the ad its remarkable character is the voiceover featuring the swimmers’ thoughts as they contemplate and participate in their daily adventure…
“The world is a very difficult place if you let it be a difficult place – we need to go back to years and years ago when people didn’t do things sometimes and just sat and did nothing.
I’d say it’s the cheapest form of drug that I know of but I don’t know anything about drugs.
Everyone dies but very few people really live.
It’s amazing how clear your mind can be what you think is a problem going in is not a problem anymore.
You’re in a world of your own; it’s different, the cold freezes the brain.
You get a heightened sense of certainty; you get a heightened sense of life.”
The ad shows how three people turned their backs on the material world and made use of the free resource; the Atlantic Ocean, in their local community. Advertising is part of a country’s collective unconscious. Campaigns are preceded by detailed research often involving ethnography to uncover the hopes, fears, aspirations and anxieties among the population.
The data is then distilled into communication material by talented writers and art directors who add their own creative instincts to the mix, so it is not surprising that you can tell a lot about a country by the advertising it keeps. Irish businesses understood the importance of community and the lore of the local best expressed in the Gaelic; dinnseanchas.
The resulting comfort afforded by the attachment is one of the reasons why the centre held and Ireland did not succumb to authoritarian demagoguery and protectionist posturing. The recent Presidential election threw up possible fault-lines. If we want to retain our enviably humane perspective, the main centre political parties might need to consider how to further strengthen local community bonds and organisations. In an essay on dinnseanchas, poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill described it as “the cement which kept the community together and distinct – it can also become a way of uniting factions, of breaking barriers”.
John Fanning lectures on branding and marketing communications at the UCD Smurfit Graduate School of Business and chairs the Bord Bia Food Forum; john.fanning44@gmail.com
