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Somewhere West of Laramie

Somewhere West of Laramie

I've never forgotten the trailer for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. If you've never seen it, go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzAnE4zuYuA. Why don't they make trailers like that any more?

All modern trailers seem to come out of a computerised trailer-maker that's been programmed not by a human being but by the last 1000 trailers to emerge from that very same trailer-maker.

They use sound to indicate not the distinctive characteristic of any film but to bludgeon the senses as if in a disco. They use special effects indiscriminately. The pace of the editing is frenetic, irrespective of the pace of the film itself. Lines of dialogue are selected not to hint at the storyline – the film's premise, its narrative hook – but for their ability to shock. Sometimes the nature of that shock is totally out of sympathy with the mood of the movie. These trailers could be for any one of 50 quite different feature films.

The Psycho trailer could be for no film other than Psycho. Hitchcock himself takes us on a guided tour of the scene of the crimes. At one point he opens a cupboard, the door swinging towards the camera so that we can't see inside. He looks in: then closes it again with just a flick of an expression in our direction. We never know what he's seen. The music track is gently insistent yet never intrusive. The pace throughout is almost leisurely and the content – until the very final moment – quite unsensational. Yet the suspense that's built up and sustained would keep the most restive of audiences with hands frozen over their popcorn buckets.

The Psycho trailer is a brilliant advertisement, a masterly example of brand persuasion. You know precisely what to expect, why it's good and why you've got to go and see it. The only thing that might stop you going would be your fear of being too frightened; and that's a bit like deciding not to buy a box of chocolates in case you enjoy them too much.

Today's trailers, I suspect, are made not by people who love films but by people who love trailers. When they set out to make a specific trailer, their inspiration is not the specific film for which it is designed but those other trailers that are most admired by other trailer-makers.

For all I know, there are trailer festivals and trailer awards evenings, and DVDs containing the world's best trailers as judged by the world's most eminent trailer-makers.

Ordinary advertising, it seems to me, suffers from exactly the same drift. Look at a reel of car commercials and – with a few welcome exceptions – they've all come out of a car commercial factory. The people who've made them love car commercials a great deal more than they love cars. Their values are not car values but film values. Their strap-lines are interchangeable and they've subcontracted all attempts at originality to the post-production companies. Special effects are now so universally used that they no longer inspire any sense of wonder. They have absolutely no sense of brand.

I've told the story before of Len Heath's Aston Martin. He was in his fifties when he bought it and he loved it dearly. When he told me he'd bought it because he'd read about it in an advertisement, I did my best to look impressed. 'But the thing is,' said Len, 'I saw that ad when I was 15.' If you're ever trying to explain to people the difference between product advertising and brand advertising, I recommend the story of Len Heath's Aston Martin.

Can you name an ad for a car today that might make such an impression on a 15-year-old boy that he'll still be lusting to buy that car in 2047? Because the inspiration for so much advertising is other advertising, there is a terrible dearth of differing styles. Where advertising is taught, students are encouraged to study advertisements. Unsurprisingly, the advertisements they then create turn out to be curiously similar to other advertisements. That's how their tutors and prospective employers know they're good. But of course, advertising students shouldn't be encouraged to study advertisements; they should be encouraged to study advertising; which means that they should be encouraged to study brands.

The 100 Greatest Advertisements, published around 1960, contains 113 print ads, mainly from America, that appeared between 1852 and 1958. The range of styles, the diversity of techniques, is infinitely greater than any equivalent work would be able to muster today. Nobody had taught their creators what ads should look like; they just worked out, assignment by assignment, working always from the essence of the product in question, the form of presentation that would encapsulate that particular subject most beguilingly. They were tailor-made, from the inside out.

The word brand crept into common use from about 1955 onwards. But a true understanding of the nature of brands is clearly evident in work done up to 100 years earlier.

A 1918 ad from the Jordan Motor Car Company reads in part:

Somewhere West of Laramie ... there's a bronco-busting, steer-roping girl who knows what I'm talking about.

The truth is – the Playboy was built for her.

Built for the lass whose face is brown with the sun when the day is done of revel and romp and race.

She loves the cross of the wild and the tame.

Step into the Playboy when the hour grows dull with things gone dead and stale.

Then start for the land of real living with the spirit of the lass who rides, lean and rangy, into the red horizon of a Wyoming twilight. And the illustration is little more than a sketch: a very simple, wonderfully evocative black and white impression of car, speed, flowing scarf, bronco and mountain. There must have been many 15 year olds in 1918 who never rested until they'd bought themselves a Jordan Playboy some 40 years later.

I'm not, of course, implying that ads in 1852 were all much better than they are today. The 100 fine advertisements in the book were chosen from many millions, most of which, no doubt, were ugly, ill-directed, crass, repetitive, wasteful and an insult to the intelligence. Many told shameless lies.

It's just that the best of those early advertisements, like the best of early trailers, drew their forms and inspirations not from some central consensus of how all ads and trailers should look and sound, but from each of the brands and the films that they set out to celebrate. A return to that custom would add much needed variety to our advertising landscape – as well, of course, as being highly effective.


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