Commercial flop: Boots No7 ads

I’m a big fan of Boots No7 products. Together with my fanatical multi-disciplinary fitness regime (eating chocolate while watching television), Boots products are holding back the years like nobody’s business.

But threatening to undo all that good, wrinkle-erasing work are their teeth-grindingly awful TV ads. Basically, it doesn’t matter what the product is, the ad has to conclude with a female voice-over reiterating the product or the offer, followed by “Ta-dah!”

It’s that “Ta-dah!” that makes me want to rub Protect and Perfect into my eyeballs. It’s supposed to convey that, having used the product, you’re now ready for your public / the cameras / the school run / whatever. It’s a little fanfare. But for some reason it’s delivered in a smug, irritating, throwaway style. As a fanfare, it’s weak and pathetic. It’s like ‘Nessun Dorma’ would sound if it was sung by Lily Allen. It’s just annoying.

A quick google has led me to the shock discovery that this atrocity has been running since 2011. The “creatives” behind it, ad agency Mother, explained their thinking: “What we want to show with the ‘Ta-Dah’ campaign is a moment in time that all women have, when they know they look and, perhaps more importantly, feel their absolute best.”

I’ll leave to one side the notion that feeling your best is only “perhaps” more important than looking your best, to just wonder whether these amazing and rare moments in life couldn’t be celebrated some other way than with that horrible, horrible “Ta-dah.”