Barry Scott
I idly noticed a new (I think) advert for Cillit Bang on the television the other day. It featured "Barry Scott" once again. Presumably most readers will be familiar with the old round of adverts, in which "Barry Scott" confidently introduced himself then extolled the virtues of the product in a booming voice.
This new advert seems to have taken the man and cranked up his voice even louder such that he is almost shouting unreasonably at us when describing what Cillit Bang can do.
A brief glance at Wikipedia confirms that the actor who plays "Barry Scott" is in fact called Neil Burgess and once played an axe murderer in The Bill.
The line of enquiry is as follows: why fabricate a celebrity endorser in the first place, given that such a non-existent celebrity can by his very non-existence carry no weight with consumers? Was it intended that the confidence of his self-introduction would actually subconsciously lead people to believe that he was a famous person?
And - more philosophically - is he now a bona fide celebrity through his non-existence?
4 comments:
I have no idea what drove the advertising boffins to create Barry Scott - perhaps they were just on a very tight budget. Maybe it was a stab at kitsch. Maybe they'd had far too much coke that day. Barry acts like he might have had a line or two himself.
But I can confirm that, like Howard from the Halifax bank adverts, Barry has taken on some kind of peverse cult status. He has his own blog (http://www.barryscott.blogs.com/), a hardcore dance remix of his advert on the Nukleuz label, several fansites, plus a spin-off band called Barry Scott and the Cillit Band, who you can find on myspace. He is now most definitely a bona fide celebrity.
Barry Scott is merely following in the well trodden footsteps of Barry Bethel, who endorsed Slimfast in the 1990s. Bethel was supposedly a "celebrity DJ" and would appear on screen, look at an old photo of him as a fatty and say: "I can't believe that was me - Barry Bethel!" As far as I know he was a purely fictional character. I was greatly fond of the adverts at the time.
Looks like I was dead wrong about Bethell being a fictional character: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/7296970.stm
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