14 Dec

Heathrow ad: an absolute dog’s dinner

It’s Sunday, I’m slightly irritated by the fact that I’m working today, and my last post was a positive one … so I feel the need to tear a strip off someone/something.
In the firing line is this complete mess of an ad, seen at King’s Cross Station, for Heathrow Airport (more specifically, it’s about doing your Christmas shopping there):

20141206_170310

What on earth is going on in this ad? How did it escape from an agency and end up on poster sites at major train stations?

Are the two people shown supposed to be a couple? They look like two separate stock images thrown together to create a couple (the type of thing you’d see in a student’s spec folio i.e badly photoshopped, but you get the gist of the ad).
They don’t just look like they have different skin tones – they look like separate pictures taken under different lighting.
Also, what’s going on with her left arm?

Why is she spraying perfume directly at her eyes, while looking in completely the opposite direction? Who does that?
Why is he absentmindedly touching her shoulder, while looking at aftershaves? It just looks odd.

Why does the copy read like it was written in a tremendous hurry, with little time to consider whether it quite made sense?
I get ‘Heathrow shopping, pour homme, pour femme’, but ‘for Christmas, it’s a gift’ just sounds clumsy. What is it that’s ‘a gift’: shopping at Heathrow?

The whole ad just gives a similar feeling to watching this scene, below, from The Office – awkward:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *