Yeo ho ho; the milk’s gone off

Have you seen the television advert for Yeo Valley milk?

It’s a clever piece of advertising which is, unfortunately, spoilt by a bunch of campaign howlers.

But first, before we take it apart, let’s look at the advert.

The film features a small group of people who purport to be farmers (farm labourers? Agricultural contractors?) who rap about how good, how natural and how wholesome their product is, whilst strutting about a farm in a gangsta stylee.

The rap song is clever; I’d give ten out of ten to whoever put it together. The choreography is excellent too.

The actors don’t come across as farmers, they’re just too squeaky clean. I’m not saying I want to see signs of calf scour down the front of someone’s Barbour, but it’s just too sanitised.

But hey, it’s only an advert.

What makes the advert is the juxtaposition of a hard-edged urban musical beat, associated with gangsta body movements, set against the backdrop of green and pleasant rural scenes.

That’s original and eye-catching.

Except for the closing countryside scene, of course, which made me laugh out loud.

It’s the kind of ball-dropping cock-up that I would almost *expect* a city-dwelling ad-agency to make.

The closing shot features a panoramic view of Chew Valley Lake.

Chew Valley Lake is not a natural scene.

The lake is man-made, it was officially opened by HMtQ in the mid-1950s.

The lake was constructed by removing families from their homes; people were evicted and their land was purchased on Compulsory Purchase Orders by the Government, acting on behalf of Bristol Water.

Let’s be clear.

I’m not saying that Chew Valley Lake is a bad thing.

I am simply saying that Chew Valley Lake is as natural to the countryside as the nearby Mendip television transmitter that overlooks the valley.

i.e., not natural at all.

They both look good, but they’re both man-made. And when Chew Valley Lake was built homes and farms were destroyed, roads were flooded and 1,200 acres of the British countryside were lost.

So no, not natural.

Which is a bit unfortunate really, considering that the advert is selling the countryside (and the milky product) as being, you know, natural. And that.

As a brief aside, the last time I lived in Somerset (and I lived in the Mendip district) we were burning cows.

The carcasses were stacked up by JCB and the incineration pits were alight for weeks on end. The stench of burning flesh sat, like a cloyingly heavy pall, over the Somerset wetlands for what seemed like months.

Ah well. Perhaps that’s the image of the countryside that we’re meant to forget?

So I let the campaign rumble on around me; after all, it’s obviously a piece of puff and hype created by townies for townies and, on rural matters at least, I know more than a roomful of townies. And a roomful of townie-based advertising/PR staff.

But yesterday I learned that the good people at the advertising agency behind the Yeo Valley campaign are (are you sitting down?) selling the rap song.

Yes, for £0.79p you can get over to iTunes to buy an advert!

What?

One has to admire the audacity of the PR world.

Getting the punters to *buy* an advert?

Brilliant!

Bottles of Bollinger all round.

Of course, the admen (and women) have sweetened the pill by saying that (and I quote) ‘all proceeds’ will go to a worthy cause…

Except that’s not the case, but I’ll deal with that utter falsehood in a minute, because right now I’m still stuck on the concept of the Great British Public being conditioned to *buy an advert*.

This is a fantastic, if cynical, ploy to establish the paradigm in our lives that it is a perfectly acceptable behaviour to buy an advert.

Look people, it’s cool to buy an advert.

It’s a neat song.

And if you buy *this one* we’ll give the money away!

Of course, we won’t give away all of the money from future campaigns, but that’s in the future.

We’re talking Zeitgeist, baby.

Right now we just want you to feel comfortable about paying for an advert.

OK?

Erm, no.

Not OK at all.

Not OK on a number of levels and here’s just one.

The people behind this brilliant piece of sheep-leading marketing have chosen, as their point of sale, Apple’s iTunes.

And that’s wrong for two fundamental reasons.

First of all, iTunes is not an inclusive platform.

Oh sure, it’s fine as long as you’re a Windows or a Mac user, but if you happen to be one of those other types, one of the people who choose not to use a corporate computing platform?

Forget it.

Instead of using a global download product like Bandcamp, which is platform agnostic, the admen have proved that they too are sheep who are stunningly unable to think for themselves.

Secondly (and I’ll do this pricing in US Dollars, but the logic holds true in £ Sterling), from the sale price of every track sold on iTunes for 0.99c, the artist/recording label gets 0.65c.

Or to put it another way, Apple, for being the middleman in the transaction, makes 0.34c from every download.

So when you buy your advert (doh!) you’re sending a large proportion of the sale price to a £ multi-billion corporation who already makes more money in an hour than you’re going to make in your lifetime.

Doh!

Now the falsehood.

When the ad-agency tells us that all proceeds go to a worthy cause, what they mean is all proceeds after Apple’s cut.

Because I’ve asked around in the music industry, and do you know how much evidence there is that Apple have agreed to waive their percentage on this advertising campaign?

None at all.

So, hey, if you want to give money to Apple, you just go ahead and buy the advert from iTunes.

Marvellous.

Of course, it would be churlish of me to point out that if the ad-agency staff had used Bandcamp (as suggested earlier), they could have allowed the consumer to set their own price.

So instead of being fitted-up to buy an advert for £0.79p, we could have taken a less painful course and paid, say, £0.25p for it.

Another benefit of using Bandcamp, is that their overhead begins at 15% per download (this is significantly less than Apple’s cut!), and, at 5,000 downloads, Bandcamp’s margin drops to 10%.

But still, we can expect ad-agencies to know everything about their campaign, can’t we? Everything such as:

• Chew Valley Lake not being natural, or
• iTunes not being a global product, or
• iTunes ripping off the consumer with inflated margins, or
• Bandcamp being a global download product, or
• Bandcamp being cheaper to the consumer, or
• Bandcamp retaining a smaller margin

Or is that too much to ask?