I see you baby, shakin’ that ass

Earworms; those strands of tuneage that crawl in to the edge of subconscious thought, they burrow deep in to the fibrous matter that binds cognitive function together and hibernate, only to awaken at the most inappropriate moment and secrete their vile cargo of tunedom in to the aural network.

I see you baby, shakin’ that ass. Shaking that ass.

Groove Armada have a lot to answer for.

Why is that tune stuck in my head? Is it being featured in a current advert?

And why can’t my earworm be something *good*?

I’d like it to be The Beatles ‘Twist and Shout’. Either the original 1963 EMI/Parlophone recording, or the 1986 ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ remix – because that version of ‘Twist and Shout’ is awesome and should not be written off!

Sigh.

I suppose my earworm infection could be worse. It could be ‘Hands’, the new single from the Ting Tings.

*shudder*

Speaking of current TV adverts, which we were, have you noticed that (on British commercial television) there are a lot of adverts that feature… cows?

Things like that – one species being plucked out of relative obscurity and being put in the public spotlight en masse in many random advertising campaigns – things like that don’t happen by fluke.

So the head of some advertising agency has relocated the charming Samantha and their two charming offspring, charming James and charming Rebecca, from charming Chelsea to deepest, darkest Surrey.

Our adman was awoken, on his first morning at his new pad, by a strange and fearful noise. He threw back the curtains to investigate and saw, for the first time – in the flesh – a flock herd of Friesian cows.

After thinking ‘What the hell are they!’, he collected his thoughts, realised that these strange, alien creatures had some marketing potential and, sadly, the poor things are now all over our televisions, selling us

• Banking services (how surreal!)
• Milk
• Cheese
• Milk from another supplier
• Yoghurts
• Butter
• Yoghurts produced by someone else

It’s a good job the Ad Agency exec hasn’t moved to Lands End, otherwise our screens would be full of seals.

But I was just wondering how the Ad Agency exec used to sell us these products before he moved to deepest, darkest Surrey.

And that, in turn, led me to ponder – just for a moment – how successful the power of advertising really is.

I mean, is there scientific evidence, proven, through the critical application of an open, empirical process, that categorically states without any degree of greyness that advertising actually works?

n.b. Embedding an earworm such as ‘I see you baby, shakin’ that ass’ isn’t proof that advertising works. It is just proof that advertising is capable of irritating the bloody hell out of us.

For example, take that song by Groove Armada. It has been used by Renault to sell to the public the notion that one of their cars had an attractive rear when, in fact, the rear in question looked as if the designer just couldn’t be bothered, and crossed out his own work.

Besides, who would buy a Renault anyway (apart from the French, obv, who would buy anything that had a French badge on it, no matter how ugly or impractical the thing was) – let alone buy a Renault with a half-finished un-aerodynamically-styled rear?

And a half-finished un-aerodynamically-styled rear that not, in a squillion billion trillion months of Sunday, could even remotely be called either attractive or ‘ass-like’.