Terrible advertising

Last night I saw something so strange on the way back from the airport that it's taken almost 24 hours for me to process it: advertising for the International Gemological Institute.

It's not just because the word "Gemological" seems like it was probably made up yesterday. It was more the contents of the adverts.

In the first ad, a sleazy man in a brown suit, rocking a pervert-standard moustache, is trying to sell a woman a diamond ring, on the road across from the Arc De Triomphe. Suddenly a huge certificate spins across the screen, and then you're warned to always buy genuine diamonds. Finally, the woman and the sleazy guy are seen both frantically gurning and waving at the viewer.

In the second ad, a Chinese guy is buying a lady in a pink dress some flowers. And then a diamond ring. And then a huge certificate whooshes across the screen. Finally, you see the woman staring at the screen, while the guy stares at her arse.

Both fairly inept adverts, but the strangest thing is that they're both computer generated: all the participants are those slightly unreal, CGI'd puppets like the ones the Taiwanese news bureaus use to reenact recent stories. So the moustache, and the checking out of the lady's backside, are both quite intentional. Not slip-ups, forced on the advertisers because it was too expensive to reshoot. No, the best way the International "Gemological" Institute can think of to advertise certified diamonds, is to suggest mental images of pervy men with bad facial hair, eyeing you up outside poorly rendered¹ tourist locations.

¹ I mean the CGI isn't any good. I'm not saying anything unkind about the standard of cheap building coating material in France, honest.