Butter and Other Swiss Advertising

Yesterday, one of my favorite blogs, Swiss Story, posted one of the butter billboards that have gone up around Switzerland. I too, had taken a photo of one of these, as upon seeing it on Sunday, I couldn't help but stop and stare. My butter ad, posted below, has, as you can see, already been slightly defaced by another person that also found it inspiring.

Anyhow, for those that haven't read about it on Swiss Story, the translation for the butter ad is: "I eat butter. I don't."

In the image, the preppy guy says he eats butter and the bodybuilder guy says he eats something other than butter (hmm...steroids?). Anyhow, the point of the advertising is that butter is natural and everything else is not.



I'd like to take a moment here to ponder the Swiss obsession with butter. Not just because of these ads, but also, for instance when I asked a Swiss friend who had lived in New York what he thought of the United States, his only comment was, "I couldn't believe the butter."

I thought he meant the prices, since butter here is amazingly expensive (but now we know why--they have to pay for all this amazing advertising). But in fact, my friend was overwhelmed by the amount of butter choices available in U.S. grocery stores. So utterly confused in fact, that he shopped at CVS (a drug store that also has an aisle or two of groceries) during his years in the U.S. so he wouldn't have to face such an overwhelming aisle of fattening goodness.

Anyhow, yesterday at the train station, they were handing out free handy wipes--to advertise a new brand called Desinfect. Of course, I took one since I couldn't pass up one of those rare moments to something free in Switzerland. Everything on the package they handed out was in German except the tagline which read, "When there is no water to hand."

Hmm. Out of the sheer badness of this phrase, I went to the website, and sure enough, this tagline is proudly printed everywhere. Wow. Good for them. I mean, it's not every day you can write something that makes absolutely no sense and get away with printing it on millions of products. I mean, it's so bad, I went that extra step to do that additional research.

Just goes to prove, bad advertising does work. Look at me, I've just wasted a half hour writing about two examples not to mention given them free PR. Ah well, I don't work as the lone English copywriter in Zurich for nothing. Although it looks like I've found at least one more company could use a little of my expertise.