The Sun’s kissogram: all this for 30p.

Soon enough this blog will be a serious and sensible “showcase for employers” – a portfolio of my very best writing style and insight into my expert opinions on the media industry. But not yet. Because firstly, where’s the fun in that? And secondly, I don’t have expert opinions on the media industry (they’re novice at best, wrong at worst).

At the risk of sounding as though I love The Sun a bit too much, I’m going to blog about the paper again. Or to be more precise, the advertising campaign of the paper that most of my friends love to hate, but I actually love to love.

I saw the new advert for The Sun on television last week (which can be viewed on the Guardian’s website). I must have been viewing a television programme that the paper thinks its target audience watches (this could have been one of many equally brilliant programmes, including X Factor, My Super Sweet 16, The Hills, Hollyoaks, America’s Next Top Model etc etc), and I don’t know whether this worries or excites me. Nevertheless, the advert came on TV, and I loved it.

For those lacking in exquisite taste in television, allow me to elaborate: it begins with a lovely looking couple reading The Sun on a bench in a wholesome looking green space. As they unfold the paper, it gets bigger and bigger and more lovely looking people join the lovely looking couple to read it until suddenly – the whole park is reading The Sun! (I am glad this isn’t how papers work in reality; I struggle reading one on the tube as it is.)

I’ll happily ignore the fact that most actors in the advert either looked like Guardian readers or the “trendy” young things on the Hollyoaks Extra adverts. Sun readers, apparently, are well cool and, like, kiss and everything. I also love the fact that the Guardian tells me that: “Scotland will air tailored versions of the commercial” – I reckon in Glasgow they use tongues.

The tag line is: “all this for 30p”. Flipping good point too – 30p is cheaper than a Mars Bar for goodness sake. In the wake of The Inde increasing its price to £1 (I could get two Mars for that), the fact that the Sun has managed to actually cut its price only serves to emphasise its reign as King of Papers.

I just wish other papers were in such a privileged position and would kindly cut their prices thereby enabling me to read them. I just wish the world (and the newspaper industry) was as feel-good and happy clappy as the advert portrays. Ah sack it, I just wish someone would kiss me under the comforting blanketness that is The Sun.