On the Graham Norton show, the actress Rosamund Pike was saying her children were taking Mandarin lessons.
Graham Norton asked her if they’d learned much Mandarin.
She said the one phrase they kept repeating was: “Jiu xiang tuo xia kuzi fangpi yiyang”.
He asked her if she knew what it meant.
She said it means when we make something unnecessarily complicated “It’s like taking down your trousers to fart”.
Of course, the audience loved it, everyone cracked up.
What fascinated me was that even when learning a foreign language, we mainly remember the things that make us laugh.
A little while back, a Polish expression caught on in the UK, not in the original Polish of course, which was: “Nie moj cyrk. Nie moj malpy”.
No, it was the translation that caught on, I heard lots of people saying it.
When you don’t want to get involved in something, you say: “Not my circus. Not my monkies”.
It was funny so it caught on.
A while back I was watching an Italian chef on the BBC.
He was demonstrating an authentic dish but couldn’t find the proper implements.
The TV host said, if they were in Italy he’d obviously have all the correct utensils.
The chef said: “Se mia nonna avesse le ruota sarebbe una bicicletta.”
The English host asked him what that meant.
He said it meant: “Yes, and if my granny had wheels she’d be a bike”.
Which cracked everyone in the studio up, even the cameramen.
My father-in-law was Chinese, he couldn’t read or write or speak English, in fact there was only one English expression he used and he made that up himself.
He would get irritated when anyone was late for an appointment or deadline.
He would just tap his watch and growl: “Rubber time”.
The visual of a clock with rubber hands works so well for a casual attitude to time-keeping that it’s passed into our family’s regular usage.
Laughter is a good way of getting anything into the language, any language.
People love to repeat what makes them laugh.
That means they must remember it and, for us, that’s free media.
But we don’t seem interested in that anymore, we’re not interested in getting our advertising into the language and getting free media.
We seem to think an esoteric emotional appeal is enough.
But in real life, the appeal to emotion doesn’t survive beyond focus groups.
Because people can’t repeat it in the street, or the shops, or at work, or anywhere really.
Visuals also can’t be repeated, so no word-of-mouth , no free media.
Recently, I saw the phrase “Does what it says on the tin” used in a restaurant review on the Time Out website.
That’s a line that Steve Henry’s agency did for Ronseal, decades ago.
How many millions in free media do you suppose the client has had as a result of that?
When it caught on, David Cameron even used it in Parliament to describe an MP, he said “We call him Ron, after the Ronseal advert, because he does exactly what it says on the tin”.
That got repeated across all the news channels.
You can’t even buy space in the news, at least not with money, you need brains.
And that ad-line has become shorthand for something you can trust and rely on.
How great is that, to have that thought associated with your brand in perpetuity?
Especially when it costs no more than a vacuous appeal to emotion that’s forgotten before the ad-break’s even over.
Last night I saw a car commercial that ended: ‘Movement that inspires’, what does that even mean?
Doubtless it’s been justified intellectually as an appeal to consumers’ emotions.
The intellectual approach to advertising, as a thesis, is what’s sucked the fun out of it.
We now have a strategic approach to advertising that’s like marking term papers.
It’s nothing to do with fun, it’s about justifying a logical argument.
And in that situation, anything out-of-place is naughty and wrong.
The problem is, the naughty part is also the fun part, and if you suck out all the fun you also suck out the reason to get remembered and repeated.
BMW and Cadburys both did campaigns based on the word JOY.
That’s a car and a chocolate bar both intellectually arriving at the same strategy.
Well, you can write the word JOY at the end of an ad, but that doesn’t make it joyful.
Don’t tell you’re a comedian, make me laugh.
in yiddish they say, if my grandmother had balls she’d be my grandfather
Monkeys.
Make me laugh is a brilliant strategy, very well illustrated here.
When I first started drinking beer, back in the UK, I loved the line:Stella Artois, reassuringly expensive. It was used in the UK for thirty five years.
I’ve used it myself many times, particularly when explaining the rich fees I charged when running my own hedge fund, here in the US – where the ad line was never used.
The irony, for those who don’t know, is that Stella is as ubiquitous and inexpensive in Belgium as Budweiser is here in America.
i was taken on a tour of a new agency about 10 or so years ago. Every person there was seated at a computer in, of course, a wall-less, open seating plan, wearing headphones for a modicum of privacy, with absolutely no conversation or interaction between them. And this was the “creative” dept. I knew then that joy and fun had gone out of the process. A SILENT creative department? “Jiu xiang tuo xia kuzi fangpi yiyang”.
Dear Dave,
Nice to see a bit of Polish flavor in your content!
Tiny Fox, it’s: “Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy.” “Moje” is the plural form of “mój.”
Best,
Andrzej (your loyal Polish language patrol;))
Od course I meant “Tiny fix”. 🙂