Beyond the brand

Marketing no hay

When I graduated and deconstruction was still perched on the edge of being past it, it was well known that advertising stank. It made you buy stuff you didn’t want or need, and was a tool of capitalism and/or the establishment along with the media and, in fact, a lot of books, such as FR Leavis. In the intervening years, I had forgotten this eternal truth, but I have been struck by it since living in Almeria. The fact is, there is almost no advertising here. There are no posters, no bus stop hoardings (no bus shelters at all) and there are no ads on the sides of buses or taxis. Even in magazines, most advertising seems much less in-your-face, though of course Spanish Vogue has the same 25 pages of designer ads – but that’s another country altogether, that place where the internationally rich live. You could say this is because Almería is poor, and therefore nobody is worth tempting, but from memory, I don’t think Madrid is that much worse than Almería. Of course, the Lake District is not full of advertising hoardings either, but it’s a small place, and you can go miles and miles here without seeing a caption. It is a huge relief: having got into the habit of thinking advertising was clever, since so many graduates work in it, I now think that actually things like “It’s utterly butterly” are not that brilliant but more annoying or at the very least a huge misdirection of talent. I don’t except myself from this, since I wasted plenty of my life thinking up stupid brand slogans for a bunch of engineers or lawyers.

(Since everyone that did English was advised to go into advertising, a few people I knew did go into it and were quite embarrassed about taking the capitalist shilling - but they got over that pretty quickly as they got paid well and had cars. I nearly took a first job with Young and Rubicam and it has to be said that their canapés were very dinky. However, I didn’t; I did a doctorate instead, which was a fat lot of good and also quite dreadfully boring most of the time, though I quite like the fact that if someone says “is there a doctor in the room!” I could say yes, plus it was for years a good put down for anyone who called me “Miss,” and for men that patronised me in general. If I had done it, I don’t suppose things would have turned out any differently, since despite my initial aim of avoiding anything to do with marketing, I ended up working in it more or less, perhaps because all roads lead there. )

When I was still doing that stuff, I read some articles in El País about the brand of Spain, written by the brand guru Wally Olins, whom I was about to meet and who is a vague relation by marriage. Country brands, apparently, are the latest thing, and the articles were all about how Spain as a brand was undervalued – hence why all the olive oil here has to be repackaged as “Italian,” to sell to northern Europeans who think Italy is more upmarket than Spain. A few days ago I met a wine and food salesman in the Intermarché supermarket in Vera, who told me that the same is true of anchovies: people think the San Antonio ones are better although they are all swimming about in the same sea. Such is the power of marketing, but I sincerely hope the Spanish don’t get some agency to re-brand themselves – not that I really imagine that would ever happen. So far, this is not a slick, packaged country, but a rough-edged one, and trying to position it like Italy would be akin to trying to turn Clint Eastwood into Brad Pitt. Heaven forbid. The fact that you can’t find a landscape without a crane, an overflowing litter bin and no water might be a drawback, but by the same token it keeps out all the people who want a nice unspoilt green picnic spot with a view of a lake.

New words

Today I went to join the local farm cooperative, about five miles out of town on the empty road to Uleila de Campo. Here, you can buy various useful commodities such as slightly cheaper petrol, animal feed and hay. It sits next to the place where they make President cheese from local goat milk – which, by the way, is branded French and not Spanish. My neighbour’s husband works there, so I know. They used the phrase “darse de alta” for “joining” the coop – I had been using “apuntarse,” which does mean something like “to put your name down for,” but this was apparently not the best choice in this context. “Darse de alta” is also used on websites, when you join or subscribe: an alta is a medical certificate, I think. This is one of the things about learning a language that you can only pick up by doing stuff – and which makes most days interesting in some way. Before I came to Spain, and when I thought I might work in Madrid doing a proper job, I spent a lot of time learning words like “rueda de prensa” (press conference) although Spanish is very short on marketing words and says things like “el marketing” as a result. Now, most of my new words vocabulary is now words like animal feed, pickaxe and shovel, and, because of Alexander’s homework, things like “hang glider.” We had to spend one and a half hours last night classifying a list of vehicles into the means by which they move, which was educational, and the day before that we did tools.

Meanwhile, it has rained almost non-stop for two days, and the whole week has been Scottish. Now that one batch of visitors has gone, we are expecting Jasmine and family – she is bound to be disappointed in the weather and to look plaintively at the sky talking about “call this Spanish sunshine!” as if I were personally responsible. Having said that, I am really looking forward to seeing her – she may wear stilettos by the pool, but she also has the heart of gold to go with. Meanwhile, I am taking advantage of one day of freedom.