Advertising – what are they thinking?

So there I am sitting on a plane and the only reading material I have to hand is a copy of the Daily Mail (for those not in the UK, this is a daily newspaper that tries to be somewhere between a broadsheet and a red-top with some added sensationalism thrown in for good measure) printed in Europe.

As I scan the pages trying to find something other than negative comments about the state of the world, I come across one page that caught my eye. It had an advert for Jessops, the well known UK camera shop chain. 

What really struck me was the use of the image that has been doing the rounds of a couple on the banks of Lake Minnewanka in Canada, with an inquisitive ground squirrel in the foreground, and the slogan “If only they’d gone to Jessops”. 

Here it is for those that missed it: 

This made me think. What exactly are the advertisers trying to say with this advert? I’m not really sure, but this is all I can come up with:

If only they’d gone to Jessops… they’d have got a better picture.
- Clearly Jessops don’t think it’s a good enough picture but they’ve decided to use it for advertising anyway.
- The fact that it has circled the globe by email, spawned a whole series of spin-offs, made the couple that took it famous for 15 minutes (and some money – I assume Jessops paid for the picture), and is a once-in-a-lifetime photo you simply couldn’t plan for, not to mention a holiday moment they will always remember fondly, is most obviously lost on the marketing people at Jessops. Something that doesn’t surprise me based on some of the marketing people I’ve met in the past.

So what are they suggesting? All I can assume is that if you want to capture a great photo, that is funny, unique, unplanned, valuable and an internet hit…. don’t go to Jessops. 

If anyone can enlighten me with some suggestions as to what they may be trying to get at, please let me know. You may not restore my faith in marketing people, but you will at least convince me I’m not going slowly mad… or maybe I am?!