Of course! A Wonder Room! Perfect! Because more shady squillionaires throwing money around and rubbing our faces in it is just what a divided country at war on two fronts needs…
As reported approvingly in the Independent’s media & advertising section today:
From the Wonder Bra to the Wonder Bar, Trevor Beattie has come up with a lovely new campaign to promote what sounds like quite possibly London’s finest (and most expensive) shopping experience.
Can’t give them any marks for timing, launching this campaign as they have just as the money markets are in meltdown and the private equity barons find they’re not quite as rich as they thought they were. If I was the account manager for this campaign I might be questioning my team’s zetgeist-surfing ability and maybe cutting off their access to the company basketball hoop until they shape up.
Selfridges is opening a Wonder Room (complete with bar), which will sell some of the most luxurious watches, jewellery and gifts in town. The £10m project is the biggest in-store initiative the retailer has ever launched, and Beattie McGuinness Bungay is advertising its riches using hand-written cards placed in local newsagents’ windows. The cards are “wanted” ads, for example: “Wanted: one golden fleece (L or XL). Please contact the Wonder Room, Selfridges.” Or: “Wanted, 1 breeding pair of unicorns.”
“Wanted: one honest prime minister” might’ve been more apposite. That really would be a Wonder worthy of a Room.
Apparently the campaign is the biggest use of newsagents’ media ever.
What, ever? Really? More than the ongoing “French teacxher gives strict lessons?” campaign? Somehow I doubt it: and on the moral level I find the prostitute’s ads to be vastly more honest and appealing. Megamedia pretending to be grassroots, yeah, that’s really legal, decent honest and truthful.
It’s also an amusing stunt, ably backed by some beautiful, embossed press inserts (using the same copy lines) in glossy mags and newspaper classifieds. There will be a special 3D poster site built on London’s showcase Cromwell Road, too.
The print ads are lovingly designed by the French illustrator Florence Manlik and, though it’s gloriously silly, the campaign’s already generating some buzz.
Amusing to whom? Yes, I can imagine what the six quid-an-hour office cleaners on their way to work at 4am think of having this obscene wealth pushed in their faces everywhere they go. Buzz is putting it mildly.
I could pick apart the elements of this campaign as silly and divisive ad infinitum, I could even call it obscene, but the fact remains that it wouldn’t be happening if there weren’t a market for Selfridge’s overpriced tat amongst the war profiteers, corporate raiders and asset strippers that infest London like cheese-mites. They’re all eager to show off their latest vulgar bauble to their equally loathsome friends and hangers-on in London ‘society’ and the government all of whom are hoping for a little trickle-down of their own. Little fleas have smaller fleas…
That these unaccountable, parasites are in the ascendant, even at the heart of government, leeching off the country, conspicuously consuming even as the working classes are fighting and dying abroad to support their lifestyles and poor famiilies fall ever farther behind (all enabled, aided and abetted Mr Prudence, Gordon Brown) – now that is a real obscenity.
