Mariner Boating Holidays celebrates the excesses of adland in the ’90s
A boating holidays company is targeting senior ad executives by inviting them to bring back the excesses of the nineties by avoiding work and racing boats in Sydney harbour.
A long-copy ad typical of the nineties, which the reader is led to via a web banner, is headlined: “Nobody reads long copy ads any more, except people in advertising.”
The ad begins with a description of “the decade that advertising forgot about selling things and pretty much disappeared up its own arts”. It consists of three columns of copy in small type, with a small logo in one corner.
It reads:
You could write a grandiose, selfserving long copy ad like this one, that didn’t get to the point or even mention the thing you were advertising until the last column.
The promotion, for Mariner Boating Holidays’ Ad Industry Sailing Regatta, is not revealed until the 11th paragraph.
The ad, which mulls on an era of expensive lunches, three weeks to ponder a brief and no beards, laments:
Now it’s all ROI and if there aren’t twenty thousand clicks on your banner by lunchtime you’re out of a gig, old-timer.
The agency behind the ad was Kastner & Partners. It was written by Ben O’Brien, who joined the agency from JWT in February last year. O’Brien has worked at DDB Sydney, Leo Burnett and Y&R in the last decade, but spent part of the nineties at the now defunct Foster Nunn Loveder.
The campaign launches on Monday.
It’s funny actually…. I started working in 1992 as a junior designer straight out of college and all I remember about that time were people talking about the excesses of the eighties – the 3 hour lunches at Mario’s and the friday night drinks that turned into a drunken weekend on the harbour…
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Well done Mumbo. Two apostrophes in the one ‘word’ in the heading. It puts new meaning to long-copy.
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I’ll let you have one of them, AM….
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
I, for one, vote to bring back the long boozy lunches. As long as the company is paying for it, hey, why not?
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Great ad. Love it.
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