John Singleton, Advertising & Newspaper News, October 3, 1969, p. 4.

You only have to look through any paper or magazine or sit in front of the telly for five minutes and you suddenly realise something.

Everyone and everything is beautiful.

The wife is beautiful.

Her husband is beautiful.

Their house is beautiful.

Their products are beautiful.

It is a lovely lovely beautiful beautiful wonderful wonderful world.

It is also totally unrealistic.

The wife has her curlers in.

Her husband just came home from the pub with the Saturday paper in his back pocket and splashed tomato sauce all over the sausages and the potatoes in the triple fronted, red texture, triple fronted brick bung.

One of her kids is sick in bed with the measles.

She just vomited on the sheets.

She doesn’t take much notice. When you’ve changed five baby nappies already today you don’t take much notice of a bit more mess.

She changes another baby nappy and then she cleans up the mess.

Her big-grown-up-son, six, doesn’t want to sleep there because his sister has been sick.

He cries.

His sister cries.

The baby cries.

The dishes are still on the table.

The husband is watching the footy replay.

The wife washes up. The wife dries up.

Real people out in the real suburbs where 83% of all consumer purchases are made.

Real people, doing real things.

Now the wife is almost finished the washing up.

The baby is asleep.

The elder son is playing quietly.

It is a little more peaceful now.

Saturday night. Balls. Nightclubs. The Lido. Chequers. Dinner parties. Candlelight. Furs. Music. Fun, fun, fun.

It is Saturday night at 7.30 and the wife will watch television with her husband.

The husband is asleep now. He is snoring now. The TAB tickets lie on the side of the lounge.

His face is red from the sun and the beer.

The wife sits down now. The husband snores now.

And a beautiful young wife and her beautiful young husband and their lovely children dance across the telly set, selling a lovely young product.

The wife might buy it because she wants to escape.

And she might not buy it because she also wants to be understood.

In fact casting is one of the vital elements of successful advertising.

And probably one of the elements most misunderstood.

We have personally seen study after study carried out by Dr. Peter Kenny where advertisements and commercials failed simply because the people were not relevant to the product or its promise or its market.

Sometimes the people were too basic. Too close to the bone.

But in most cases they were too lovely, too beautiful, too wonderful, too unbelievable.

God knows where it all happened: this idea that the whole wide world is one big beautiful masterpiece.

Maybe it is because advertising people are not real people at all.

Maybe it’s just because casting in advertising is really no better and no worse than the whole.