What’s the most memorable thing that’s ever happened to you? It might be an event – a birthday, marriage or birth – or it might be something that sticks in the memory for its bucket-listish quality: a bungee-jump, swimming with dolphins or a spitroast.
There’s a good chance, however, that it’s something either unpleasant or really weird – possibly both at the same time. A broken leg, a beating, being caught in flagrante, a sacking or perhaps a particularly bad day when all four happened. I had one a few months back when I returned to the car I’d recently purchased to find a massive tree branch sticking out of it – unpleasant and weird.
Perhaps the strangest thing that ever happened to me was when David Gest stepped out of a lift in a Tesco supermarket in Toxteth. If you’d asked me at the time – about 11.30pm on a Tuesday night – what was the least likely thing to happen next, there’s a good chance that David Gest (who later tried to sue me for reasons too lengthy to go into here) stepping out of the lift would be fairly high up.
For as long as I live I won’t forget that moment. And that’s why this MoneySupermarket Twerking Advert – featuring a white man with Kim Kardashian’s booty, slut-dropping and twerking his way through LA in high-heels and Y-fronts to the Pussycat Dolls, with the help of Sharon Osbourne – exists (he’s called Michael Van Schoick and insist it’s all his arse).
The weirder the better because, as I’ve discussed before, the only things these adverts are trying to do is be memorable. No message is communicated, no product sold, no brand message – it’s there to be remembered and that’s all. And to that end, literally anything can happen in price-comparison adverts in general – and MoneySupermarket adverts specifically.
Philip Schofield could swan-dive into a bowl of Angel Delight while playing Ride of the Valkyries on a paper-and-comb. Felicity Kendall could play ping-pong, Bangkok-style with Esther Rantzen while Sue Barker commentated. Nicholas Lyndhurst could fire Tic-Tacs out of a pea-shooter at a unicycling Gentle Ben in a lido. The relative merits of these ideas are irrelevant – the only metric is whether people would share it on social networks, watch the video on their smartphones and talk about it on the bus.
Juxtaposition is the new God. Dissonance is sacred. LOLZ are the only currency. Post-modernism has won and we have only post-post-modernism to look forward to. #EpicStrut = Amen. The meme is the only reality. Welcome.
Edit: Here’s an amusing skit of Cameron farting out horrible Tory policies