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The renaissance of St Trinians, a prime example of a ‘retro’ brand, reminds us that cinema knows a thing or two about marketing. Why go to the trouble, expense and risk of developing a new product when you can extend the life of a tried and tested offering by giving it a contemporary spin (provided here by the presence of Messrs Firth and Everett)? With audiences conditioned to expect big-name actors, plush production values, and expensive special effects, film backers need deep pockets and a steady nerve. No wonder that producers are so fond of the familiar – whether as remakes (often of what were remakes in the first place), or of seemingly inexhaustible franchises such as Bond, Carry On or St Trinians.

But given their (usually) assured performances as marketers (not only of their own films but via the ‘product placement’ strategies that are now an important part of film finance), it’s always struck me as odd that so few producers make films actually dramatising the lives of marketing folk. Alongside cinema’s disproportionate representation of criminals, police officers, detectives, military personnel and cowboys, we meet plenty of lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers and even the occasional university lecturer on the silver screen. All of these callings have, of course, the potential for drama and human interaction on which film depends – but so have jobs like marketing, sales and advertising. After all, as I remember being told by my first marketing director, “it’s a people business”. ”Like cannibalism”, he added after a short pause.

When films do, occasionally, portray the marketing industry they tend to share this cynicism.  A good example would be Bruce Robinson’s How to Get Ahead in Advertising (which came out in 1989, at the end of a particularly excessive decade for the industry). It starts with Dennis Bagley (Richard E Grant) holding forth about the ‘average housewife’ in a smokey advertising strategy meeting. His barrage of statistics reduces her to the condition of a puppet jerked profitably on advertising’s strings of desire and guilt, from diets to high-calorie ‘treats’ and back again.

Success in selling has brought Bagley a Chelsea tractor, a country pile and a trophy wife. But success comes at a price – and panic at not being able to think up a new campaign for pimple cream drives him over the edge. In a road-to-Damascus reversal, he resigns, vowing to expose the lies of advertising. Through the miracle of cinema, the stress-related boil he has developed becomes a spokes-pustule for all that he now opposes. The rest of the film recounts the ensuing power struggle – with results that are less than flattering for the industry.

The perils of the creative life also feature in a film released the following year, Tony Bill’s Crazy People (1990). This is a one-joke effort, relying on Dudley Moore as Emory, a creatively-blocked copywriter whose nervous breakdown inspires him to tell the truth in each ad, rather than relying on the standard repertoire of euphemism and puff. He gets carted off to an asylum, while his ads accidentally escape into the media. They cause a sensation rather than the expected furore, and Emory’s career is relaunched (although he insists on recruiting his fellow-inmates as a creative resource). By now he’s in love with one of them – played by the delectable Daryl Hannah, whose only concession to madness appears to be a slightly tousled hair look. (Rather unfairly, I think, the other inhabitants of the institution are made to look like stock characters from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). Their collection of ‘honest advertising’ runs from extolling the safety of ‘boxy’ cars to the competitive advantage of Japanese electronics companies whose workers are closer to the circuit boards than their taller Caucasian rivals. Trends in political correctness apart, I wonder if the film could ever have been made today in view of the reverence with which major corporations now venerate their brands.

My third and final exhibit from the gallery of cinema’s depiction of advertising comes from ten years later and is the only one by a female director, Nancy Meyers’ What Women Want (2000). Like Crazy People the film is a romantic comedy, a vehicle for Mel Gibson who plays the dishy but heartless Nick Marshall, yet another advertising creative. The focus of the film this time, however, is not the moral shortcomings of advertising, but the way it represents and reproduces society – specifically the rise of female economic power.

Nick is the ultimate sexist – a ladies’ man who has risen to the top of his profession on a masculine wave of advertising cars, power tools and sports utility vehicles to other guys. He only gets blocked when his agency hires a female creative director, Darcy Maguire (Helen Hunt) over his head and he is challenged to come up with some ideas for the female-oriented products and services which are now making the running in the market. But, as I mentioned, this is a romcom, and a brief electrocution gives Nick the power to read women’s minds. This gives him insight into the female consumer psyche in general, and instant access to his rival Darcy’s thoughts in particular. He thus steals the credit for saving the agency with a successful pitch for a major women’s sportswear account – but when Darcy gets fired for non-delivery, he owns up (by now, of course, in love with her) and all ends happily.

Each of these films takes a different slant on advertising ranging from depicting it as a pernicious cultural influence to a barometer of social change. But none of them are exactly in the first rank of their genre, interesting and amusing as all of them manage to be in parts. Could it be that there is something a little embarrassing for screenwriters and directors in taking the wraps off advertising as subject matter, given their own reliance as a profession on making commercials to finance more intrinsically ‘artistic’ ventures?

Find out more

• Film and society - from Love On The Dole to My Beautiful Laundrette, film has reflected and engaged the values of our culture
• Join the discussion - can films ever accurately reflect society?
• The revival of Ealing Studios - The Money Programme follows the makers of the St Trinian's remake, as they try to put Ealing back on the map
• Creative Arts Marketing, 2^nd Edition
  Elizabeth Hill, Terry O’Sullivan, and Catherine O'Sullivan, published by Butterworth-Heinemann
• Unit 6: Marketing Communications
  B825 Marketing in a Complex World
  OU Business School, Milton Keynes.

About the author

Terry O'Sullivan is lecturer in marketing at the Open University Business School. He researches and teaches in the fields of fundraising, marketing communications and non-profit marketing.