It’s just after 9am on the first day back to work after the Easter bank holiday weekend, and, in London, shopper Tracey Venning is battling to get her breakfast past the Marks & Spencer self-service checkout in St Pancras station. Through no fault of her own, each scan is greeted by the shouts of Ant and Dec, their normally soothing prime-time geordie lilt demanding that she “please scan your next item” and, when flummoxed by her bakery items, insisting that “help is on the way!”
This isn’t a candid-camera stunt for the next series of Saturday Night Takeaway, but the latest in the growing trend of faceless brands personalising their automation with chummy personas. Ant and Dec, along with Amanda Holden and Alesha Dixon, are each being paid a reported £100,000 for their M&S voiceover work, as part of the promotion for the next series of Britain’s Got Talent, joining the disembodied ranks of the Virgin Trains “talking toilet” (as modelled by career self-parodist Dean Gaffney), the gif-laden sassy Netflix Twitter account and Sunny D’s strange mimicking of depression on social media. It seems the pressure for brand engagement is pushing marketing teams into deeper and darker recesses, prompting one dentist to advertise (or threaten) that their services could “set your soul on fire”.
This is, and I cannot stress this enough, a dentist’s office pic.twitter.com/TXnB891Dvl
— Jill Twiss (@jilltwiss) April 22, 2019
Back in M&S, it seems the celebrity chorus isn’t quite engaging their customers. “I’ve just got back from a weekend with my parents, and here I am being shouted at – again,” Venning says. “I just want to get my food and leave.” Another shopper has his headphones steadfastly clamped on, scanning with abandon, while one of the shop’s employees tells me: “The announcements are very loud – we can’t turn them down.”
I have the pleasure of Holden telling me to scan my loyalty card for a donation to my chosen charity, each statement inflecting up like a question with no answer. Perhaps it would be best for the silence to reign, then, for corporate brands to remain tasteless and faceless, and for the voices to be left to the humans who have to come to my rescue anyway to age-verify my can of mojito.
