This advertisement featuring Peter O’Toole is intriguing on a number of levels. Noted for taking a colourful, rebellious and devil-may-care approach to life and the living of it, Peter O’Toole – in spite of his advancing years – is still able to lay claim to being ‘cool’. Given the spread of readers the Sunday Times is pitching to, O’Toole’s iconic status has obvious advantages in appealing to both ‘old-as-you-feel’ and ‘rebellious youth’ segments of the market.
But just taking advantage of O’Toole’s iconic status is not enough. The ad demonstrates with its ironic twist that the Sunday Times is laying claim to being cutting edge and contemporary, strongly independent, still challenging, still able to spring a surprise, in touch with and part of life’s rich tapestry of consuming experiences.
But the ad takes the irony a stage further, featuring O’Toole as a person of many parts not just in his acting career but in real life. This of course neatly opens the way for the Sunday Times to pitch its strapline: ‘The Sunday Times: for all you are.’
On this point the ad is interesting because it reveals something of a trend in what might be called postmodern marketing. No longer is it a case of knowing who you are, but of making ‘play’ and experimenting with multiple personas.
But rather than asking whether this offers a more nuanced understanding of our psychological make-up and priorities in a postmodern world, perhaps it would be more productive to think about such discursive stratagems in terms of possible consequences. One obvious consequence is that disseminating and ‘taking-as-read’ the individual constituted by the trying-out of multiple identities and desires, at one stroke, exponentially expands the market .
There only remains the simple matter of rewriting the psychology textbooks to account for this change.
