Watching Mad Men makes me think about adverts more. Perfume is really the perfect thing to advertise because it's impossible to advertise. It's about bypassing the actual product completely. It's selling an idea. What's so fantastic about advertising is the audacity of the ideas it links to the most banal products (and what products are not banal?). There's a naivete, almost. The heights of fantasy are just so soaring that it's actually quite thrilling to experience.
There's a Lynx advert in the cinema that is maybe the most perfect expression of this that I've seen (even more because it's not actually perfume, but perfume's ugly cousin, deoderant). Everything about it is brilliant. I mean, just watch it. I didn't even get, first time round, that the music is a choral version of Sexy Boy. It is self-conscious in a way that perfume adverts often seem not to be. But it is not a joke either, it's not actually ironic. It's hyperbole, which is - isn't it? - the essence of the radical.
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