A WEEKEND IN PARIS

We had just returned from Paris; I was back in my home town in a shop and about to pay for something using my debit card. I opened the small wallet where I keep the debit card and a rectangular piece of thick paper, carrying the picture shown here, fell out onto the counter, face up, and before the eyes of a female shop assistant who had probably, until that moment, always regarded me as being a fairly typical male customer of the ‘wouldn’t harm a fly’ category. She, the shop assistant, just had time to give me what my Mother would have called an ‘old-fashioned look’ before I grabbed it. I had never seen the card before. How did this piece of incriminatory evidence find its way into my wallet?

Well, I had seen the card before. I had seen its other side. If I were struggling to get a laugh I might say that I had seen the lady’s backside but that would be weak and feeble and not funny. However, the reverse side of the card carrying the picture of the delicious young lady showed that she was adding interest to something that was no more than a ticket for the exhibition of the works of Manet currently showing at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris – which we had seen a couple of days earlier.

What a clever idea this is! A ticket for any form of entertainment – and what is an exhibition of Manet’s work if it is not an entertainment? – is not a mere receipt for money paid, it is physical evidence of your experience and a reminder of it and the organisation that brought it before your eyes. From now on every time I see this picture, La Source, painted by Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres in 1856, as I open my wallet (Oh no, I am not going to consign it to a waste-paper bin, in my wallet it will remain), I shall think of this wonderful art gallery and all that it contains – including this delightful and not entirely unerotic piece of what my Father would have called ‘pulchritude’.

Let us now turn to my wife’s ticket. This does not carry a picture of a naked girl on the reverse side: it shows a hand, made of coloured glass and bizarrely decorated. This piece of glass sculpture was made in 1904 by Emile Gallé and is entitled La Main aux algues et aux coquillages – which roughly translates to ‘Hand with algae and shellfish’. The original work is, as with M. Ingres’ picture, within the Musée’s collection. Those interested in the medium of glass will know that M. Gallé is up there with M. Lalique in the creation of wonderful objects.

I wonder how wide is the variety of works of art featured on the backs of the tickets? With thousands of tickets passing over the counters every day there could well be a picture of every item in the collection. Presumably the distribution of the pictures is random …

This thought leads me to the notion of the cigarette card, that superbly conceived sales promotion device that, in its day, would have put the loyalty cards and membership schemes of today firmly in the shade. The idea was very simple. A theme was chosen, preferably something that would sit comfortably with the specific market of a cigarette brand. It could be Dogs, British Military Medals, Butterflies, Motor Cars, Film Stars and so on. Cards, measuring approximately 68mm by 35mm would be printed. On one side there would be a coloured picture of one of the items in the set and on the back there would be a brief account or description of it.

There were hundreds of different sets in circulation; cards would be produced, usually amounting to 50 in a set, and they would then be introduced at random into the cardboard cartons containing the cigarettes. Needless to say, thousands upon thousands of any one set would be produced and distributed in this way.

(Let us put out of our minds for the moment the fact that the cigarette card was promoting a deadly product and remember the words of the Salvation Army’s General Booth’s, ‘Why should the devil have all the good tunes?’ We must concentrate on the fundamental idea of a sales promotion device that may well have an application in these post-fag days.)

The cigarette card played upon a fundamental human desire to collect and, where possible, to complete a collection. Very probably the desire to acquire all the cards needed to complete a set lay not in the breast of the smoker but rather in the breasts of the smoker’s children. Once a smoker had chosen to buy a brand of cigarettes made by Godfrey Phillips Ltd that carried cards from the ‘Bird Painting’ series of 50 within its cartons and had passed on to his child, say, the Stonechat, or the Yellow Hammer picture he was a captive customer. He would loyally go on buying and passing the cards on to the offspring. Of course there would be duplicates; the offspring would go off to school with his or her ‘doubles’ and would trade them just as children do today with Pokemon cards. The duplicates increased the number of cartons required to be bought by the smoker as the children increased the pressure for them to buy a carton containing the hard-to-get-hold-of Goldfinch, Chiff-Chaff or whatever.

To this activity generated by the tobacco industry there would be added The Album. The Album was an inexpensively produced, saddle-stitched, collection of pages bearing numbered spaces into which the appropriate card would be stuck. There would be a phrase or two of descriptive prose relating to whatever was pictured on the card. The cover of The Album would be a masterpiece of brand promotion. To fill The Album so that not one space remained was the highest aspiration of any child of a parent who smoked. We thus have addiction at both levels. Evil but brilliant.

Now let us return to the tickets of the Musée D’Orsay. I suspect that its marketing folk have not yet realised the potential of their idea. Their pictures are not numbered and one is not made aware of how many there are needed to ‘make up the set’. I certainly did not see any Albums in the shop. It would be so easy for them to emphasise the collectibility of those delightful tickets so that people would be tempted to return time and time again so that as well as the experience of the collection itself there would be a souvenir to be added to the family Musée D’Orsay album.

Let our art galleries, our concert halls, our theatres, our cinemas take heed of this creative approach to the ticket. There is no reason why you should not apply this idea to your work. Not just pictures of objects in a gallery but pictures of musicians, actors, scenes from films. Give us something to collect and hence something to remember you by. Sell us beautiful albums in which our children can collect our tickets and theirs too and then you will have a loyal following. It might well prove more successful than many other attempts to bind customers into your activities.