It’s a feature of some very good, and some very bad advertising to tell the story backwards. I won’t name the bad ones (they are too numerous – and even I am not that vindictive), but the good ones include “Noitulove” and “Getting Dressed”, for Guinness and Lynx/Axe respectively. On the same principle as “If you’ve got nothing to say, sing it” (amply demonstrated by Halifax’s “Singing Cunts” campaign – oh well, there goes the “vindictive” element), this is a supposed way of creating intrigue.
I wonder how intrigued the casual observer would have been then, to have happened upon the following scene and tried to “work backwards” to the natural starting point: Good Friend in PR and me, in a bar in Singapore, singing (LOUDLY) to “Hey Jude” that is being performed by a local band, surrounded by Asian businessmen in their 50s who were accompanied by prostitutes, at a table next to a German man who appears to have been drinking orange juice (but has somehow got so drunk that he has picked up a bar stool and is waving it over his head, as he pleads for the band to perform “The Final Countdown” by 80s dignityphobes “Europe”) and is dancing like a maniac.
He and I had an epic gad – and a night that began very sedately with Good Friend in PR, and Woman Who Managed to Make Sense of Digital to Me in a very nice hotel – and one that I wish I could experience more often (ideally because we lived on the same street, but that is not to be): but it is not a night I shall forget.
