The family that breaks bread together, stays together, and more importantly, keeps buying bread. More than 30 years after the first Oxo Mum ad hit screens, the dinner table remains so laden with brand messages, it's in danger of collapsing.
Just like in real life, where the “traditional family” and its rituals are always said to be under attack from some threat or other – economics, feminism, exploitative bosses, long commutes – so too is the adland dinner table presented as the last bastion of all that is good and decent.
“When you come together with the people you love, every meal is a special occasion.”
As advertising taglines go, it's wonderfully bland, so top marks to anyone who identified it as belonging to Ikea. What better way to flog kitchens than to show mother, father and 2.4 well-behaved children organising an end-of-day "reunion" in a world where everything is spinning around a dinner-table axis.
But there's a new villain in town and its name is technology. Enter the Mars-owned pasta sauce brand Dolmio. Its ads – "When'sa your Dolmio day?" – were always aimed at people who were short of time, now they're aimed at people who are short of attention.
In its much-shared recent ‘Pepper Hacker’ ad, “frustrated mums” in Australia were filmed using a device disguised as a pepper shaker, which when twisted blocks all wifi and shuts off electronic equipment. “Technology has hijacked family dinner time. Watch the Pepper Hacker reclaim it,” Dolmio announces.
No, these devices are not available commercially. Its point is that even jar-assisted family dinners are the height of civilised behaviour compared to the anarchy of a world in which everyone is too busy playing Clash of Clans on their smartphone to look each other in the eye.
Before Dolmio, there was Coca-Cola. In one US television spot, it lamented how the dinner table was being used for things other than consuming carbonated caramel-coloured water. “We pile bills on it. We put our computer on it. Let dust gather on it ... No wonder it feels right when we actually dine together.”
May it politely suggest you use a big fat bottle of Coke as your centrepiece?
Facebook, hilariously, has no time for this sort of sentiment. In its 2013 TV ad, a family dinner is depicted as a stultifying occasion in which an elderly aunt drones on about the supermarket pet aisle. A mobile-equipped young woman escapes the tedium by checking out Facebook snaps of her friends dancing, playing the drums, having a snowball fight – activities that then come to life in the dining room.
Who says being glued to a screen is anti-social? Not Mark Zuckerberg.
SuperValu, too, steers clear of an anti-technology message in its current Good Food Karma campaign, which shows real families playfully preparing food. As it’s otherwise encouraging customers to share food porn pictures on social media, it would be odd if it also came down heavy on poor mobile etiquette.
“We believe good food matters. It brings people together,” SuperValu says. It’s a nice, simple line, though of course the opposite is also true: Nothing drives people apart like bad food.
Good Food Karma features what is still, amazingly, the lesser spotted figure in “family” ads: the Dad. There he is, flipping pancakes, spicing things up. More ads in the campaign are to come, but it feels like SuperValu isn’t going to go all “proud sponsor of mums” on us. It won’t exclude.
Too often it feels like brands want brownie points for assigning domestic tasks to men on screen or, worse, they suggest men are inherently incompetent around the house, so best ask the nearest woman to restore order. In Asda’s widely reviled Christmas ad from 2012, the Dad isn’t even competent to pick out a tree.
Asda must have thought it was paying tribute to the work that its most important customers – women – do in reality. But it went far too far. When the do-it-all mother finally makes it to the dinner table, the only seat left is a ridiculously low pouffe. Rather than engendering warm feelings towards reassuring stereotypes, it ended up portraying a dystopian vision of family life in which being the woman of the house is not only thankless, but undignified.
Bizarrely, the weary, fix-everything Oxo Mum, portrayed by the late Lynda Bellingham from 1984 to 1999, seems modern by comparison to some of today's ads. At least she was appreciated. And Oxo Mum wouldn't guilt-trip or trick her kids if they played with smartphones and tablets at the table. She'd just let Oxo get up their nostrils.
