Everyone in marketing and advertising should watch Mad Men. Not because it has something to do with the industry but because it has everything to do with being confused, lonely and a bit lost.
Along the way there are lessons about ads and brands and such. In one episode its fictional creative director, the ever-dapper Don Draper, pitches for the Kodak slide projector account. He talks about that most potent but delicate of strategies for a brand - 'nostalgia'.
Nostalgia comes from the Greek for our 'ache to return home' and its wizened face can be seen everywhere this year. Sainsbury's, Virgin, Milky Bar, Hovis, Persil and even Alta Vista have launched nostalgic commercials to celebrate their good old days recently. (OK, I lied about the last one.) It seems that many brands at the moment are keen to take us back to the times when we listened, the times when we cared, happy in the milky bosom of the market leader.
The boldest or most foolhardy of these trips down memory lane comes from Persil. In celebration of 100 years of Persil being 'tough but gentle' we listen to a voiceover from one of its 1953 ads ask us 'What is a mum?'
In crystal crisp, Dimblebian tones (that's Richard, not David) we learn that a mum is 'the kind that saves for a pretty hat and then spends the money on a cricket bat instead'.
As we journey through the mums and the suds of Persil ads past, our hearts are asked to ache for the days when a mum was a suburban martyr who knew how to get grass stains out of an Aertex undergarment (and little more).
Ah, the good old days when needy yet silent women would tremble in fear of the time when their boys would tear the apron strings and run far, far away. So successful is this commercial in evoking times past that one can almost smell the gin and the quiet desperation.
Nostalgia is powerful, but delicate. Get it wrong and you tarnish the brand with outdated values and ideas. 'Knowing' becomes 'patronising' and Persil, a brand once all about our brilliant futures, is left stranded in a bygone world we are happy to have left behind.
I hope and pray that a modern mum is the kind that arms herself with a cricket bat and sets about the confederacy of dunces that conspired to produce this commercial. As for me, this year I am nostalgic for the future. A place toward which brands should set their vision, where mums, dads, kids and mechanised domestic androids called Gunter all do the bleedin' washing.