Private Ryan's added value

It’s never pretty when marketers unwittingly juxtapose the weighty with the unworthy. Sainsbury’s last Christmas advert was widely reviled because it evoked one of WWI’s most surprising, human moments, just to get people to buy bars of chocolate. Yesterday, when I was looking through my DVDs, I found something even worse.

On the back of the D-Day 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition of Saving Private Ryan, the blurb begins promisingly. ‘In the last great invasion, of the last great war, the greatest danger for eight men… was saving one.’ Of course, this isn’t strictly true: their greatest danger was defending an important bridge, not saving Private Ryan. It is good English, though—very good, in fact. ‘In the last great invasion’ balances ‘of the last great war’; the syllables of ‘last’, ‘great’ and ‘invasion/war’ are all stressed, which makes them appropriately ponderous; ‘great war/invasion’ escalates to ‘greatest danger’; and ‘danger’ and ‘eight’ transition emotively to ‘saving’ and ‘one’. That sort of craftsmanship does justice to its subject matter. The next sentence continues in more-or-less the same vein. ‘The Saving Private Ryan D-Day 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition is a poignant and powerful homage to the soldiers of World War II.’ A phrase like ‘poignant and powerful’ is, well, poignant.

But this powerful paragraph is bludgeoned to bathos by the next sentence. ‘This epic film is now presented as a 2-disc DVD set, featuring all-new, never-before-seen added value.’ This is a triple thunderbolt, a concatenation of two synonymous hyphenated horrors and a degrading financial term. Craftsmanship is replaced with coarseness, and the commemoration of D-Day’s courageous soldiers is cheapened with the language of commerce.

It’s an issue of marketing. It’s fine to promote your wares with gimmicky language. There is a place for ‘never-before-seen,’ and even for ‘added value’—but that place is not on a Commemorative D-Day Edition; just as there is a place for a touching short about the Christmas truce, but that place is not in an advert for Sainsbury’s. Marketers should avoid these uncomfortable combinations: they sully the worthy elements, and make the trivial seem more trivial still.