Where the grass is green
By
Nigel Ryan
A jar of pickled lemons spotted recently on the shelves of a local grocery store announced on its label that the contents were "delicious with food". A helpful suggestion should you have been intending to serve them alongside a plate of sand, perhaps, but not the most imaginative of sales pitches. The pickled lemons were, incidentally, made in Zagazig. And while it is probably no easy matter to concoct a successful marketing strategy for pickled lemons -- they have always struck me as the kind of thing some people buy willingly while others would refuse even at gun-point -- Zagazig is obviously not a town in which the advertising industry seems keen to display its cutting edge.
It was in the early nineties that advertising budgets began to make their presence felt in Egypt. The most obvious symptom was the appearance on newstands, almost overnight, of a whole range of glossy magazines. They came and went at alarming speed, their only raison d'être being to mop up the money advertisers were suddenly throwing around. At times it appeared that the advertising industry had outstripped the available media and was desperately in search of more. Why else, in a country that has no audited circulation figures, would people willingly take out entire pages in magazines that, if they managed to print 4,000 copies -- and that is a very optimistic figure -- off-loaded only a fraction of them. They had no content, beyond a dozen pages of advertorial most often comprising a great many women standing in the middle of the desert in evening dress, and vast numbers of advertisements for things imported. They would, too, often begin with photographs of people standing glumly at parties, trying hard to have a good time and failing miserably. They seldom appeared to be the kind of people you would want to have to dinner. I do not think they would appreciate lemons pickled in Zagazig.
Almost as obvious was the sudden appearance of young men sporting goatees, driving mid-range cars and telling all and sundry they were "in advertising". Selling brands of washing powder had become a preferred career choice: it appeared to have everything -- creative, if spurious, connotations, seemed thoroughly modern, and allowed for the wearing of novelty ties in loud colours. Advertising, in the mid-nineties, became what import/ export had been to an earlier generation: it was inexplicably respectable and, in some circles at least -- the circles, one suspects, in which amusing socks are worn -- had become hip.
The rise and fall of the pseudo-glossy coincided with the appearance on television of the epic ad. By the latter half of the nineties these began to scale hitherto undreamed heights of bombast. One in particular, a plug for insurance, sticks in the mind, a seemingly endless series of apocalyptic images interspersed with scenes of ridiculously privileged family life. A shiny, ideal-home kitchen fills the screen: then cut to a butagas bottle exploding. Flames consume everything. A shiny car progresses smoothly along a tree-lined road surrounded by acres of green: cut to an overcrowded Cairene street along which a bus, with passengers clinging on to the doors, is caught in grid-locked traffic. Squeaky clean nuclear family, father, mother, boy-child, girl-child, have lunch beside their swimming pool set in manicured garden. Cut to worn shoes, the hem of a ragged galabiya striding down a filthy street. Crowds of poor people, looking for all the world like refugees from the opening scenes of Kozintsev's King Lear, swarm across the screen. Shiny nuclear family plays frisbee on the lawn. The bus is even more crowded. Poor people cling onto the sides. Shiny nuclear family continues playing frisbee on the lawn.
Such were the products of those young men with goatees, amusing socks and loud ties. They wielded sledge hammers, and it really wasn't very clever, or respectable, or creative. Pickled lemons are delicious with food and poor people travel on buses, cook with butagas, are dangerous, dirty, and all set to invade your perfectly manicured lawn, their only desire to burn down your kitchen. Given a choice, I'll take the first.
At the same time such obscenities were appearing on the nation's television screens the manicured lawns that must be insured were being laid out in the gated communities that were sprouting overnight along the Desert Road to Alexandria. They have, of course, been far from successful, these speculative real estate ventures, contributing much to the liquidity crisis that mired the economy three years ago. Many remain ghost towns, row upon row of empty villas that continue to have impossibly inflated price tags only because the banks that repossessed them probably could not afford to remain afloat if they valued their paper assets realistically. The books would simply not balance.
Not that the attempts to appeal to the aspirational were completely wide of the mark: several years ago I was cornered at a party by a young man wearing a loud tie who insisted that I should move to such a place for my own safety. I explained that I felt perfectly safe without gates. He looked at me with pity. The suspicion that he was mad was confirmed later when he revealed that he always kept a loaded gun in his car, just in case. He may well have been in advertising and fallen, inadvertently, for his own sales pitch. I did not examine his socks.
