Poor Howard from Halifax, who will no longer appear singing and dancing on British TV screens – having been elevated from a lowly branch position, he became the bank’s ‘brand ambassador’, his cheery grin and unscary spectacles endearing him to church fetes around the country. What now for Howard, part of a campaign deemed too upbeat for our troubled times? Where we not in the days of the internet, a pop single would surely beckon; perhaps it still does. Curiously, the firm behind the switch declared that there were into ‘evolution rather than revolution’, words that Howard might take some solace from, were they not paraphrasing Tony Hayers in I’m Alan Partridge. Is a satirist at work within the campaign? Was Howard some kind of Trojan Horse? What is inside him? We should be told.
Brands are everywhere, of course. News Hour has learned that Howard’s superior in the terrorism market would be Osama Bin Laden, who – presuming he is still alive – is the most visible ‘brand ambassador’ for the number one terrorist movement of the moment. Al Qaeda is seriously referred to as a ‘brand’ by some, and you can see why; it is a franchise, of sorts. The western ‘brand’ pushes back in the hearts and minds market, plugging democracy.
Others consider Al Qaeda a virus that attaches itself to points in a society that are receptive to it – your metaphor depends on your perspective, and the more the better, but all of them demonstrate the danger of intellectualising something that is so clearly not purely about debate.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 