BenPaddon.co.uk

Wal-Mart, the huge American supermarket chain who you might recognise as the owners of ASDA, have an ad on television at the moment which I find most confusing. The advert exudes pride and warmth at the fact that the company now have more employees working at night, the apparent benefit being that this frees up more people to help customers during the day. Personally though, if it were me, I wouldn’t boast about the fact that my company had more employees doing more work at night. Wal-Mart now seem like a bunch of wankers to me, although to be fair they seemed pretty wankerific before then.

What makes this ad even more ridiculous is that the employees are all incredibly cheerful, remarkably attractive people in their early 20s who apparently enjoy working at stupid o’ clock in the morning. They’re smiling and working and changing the cash in the tills, all to the accompaniment of what I can only assume is a cover of King Harvest’s Dancing in the Moonlight.

Who is this advert for, exactly? Who are they targeting? Because besides the song - which is a cracking good tune, incidentally - there’s nothing about this ad which seems at all positive to me. Again, it just puts forward the message, “We are Wal-Mart, we are dicks. Come shop with us!”

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again - American TV advertising makes no bloody sense.