Ferroro Roche is Back. Hooray!

Who could forget the Ferrero Roche advert? The ambassodor's party. The exquisite good taste. And people saying with this Roche you are really spoiling us. Five years on I can still recite it line for line. How we all laughed at the extreme naffness of it all. Jo and I were sad to leave that kind of quality advertising behind.

And things here can be a little different. Take government information adverts which tend to be just a little, well, blunt. If you drink and drive, you're a bloody idiot. If you go in a car with a drunk driver, he's pissed and your screwed. If you drop litter, you're a tosser. There's no telling whether these name-calling adverts actually work but the only way to keep the shock value of them is to continually up the ante, so who knows where it's all going to end.

New Zealand is a small market and it does show. A lot of the adverts are very cheap, with still photos and a commentary, in the style of cinema adverts from the 80's. Worst offender is Mick Quin, owners of Quins garages, who stands by every garage he sells. His advert features him standing by a selection of garages he has sold, pouting and looking fierce. Equally bad is rival Fair Dinkum Sheds, whose advert consists of a selection of still shots of sheds. Outbuildings are, as I have previously mentioned, a huge business here.

Adverts for cleaning products tend to be the same as the ones in England except that the name of the product is different. Vanish is NapiSan Oxyaction Max which doesn't trip off the tongue quite so easily. Cillit Bang! is Easy Off Bam! here. Bam! and the dirt is gone.

And Ferrero Roche are here as well and seem to have come up trumps again with another cracking avert, as the chocolate that fell to earth from the gods of Ancient Greece. We can only marvel at how they've got the front to pass off their tacky chocolate product as the food of gods (or indeed ambassadors), but long may they continue their efforts.