No Way José

The man in the picture is José Luis Hernández, president of luxury Spanish property purveyor, Polaris World. Not that you’d know this by the way he introduces himself in their current TV ad (with robotic delivery and with an accent so thick you could spread it on a slice of bread).

He represents one of the cardinal sins of TV advertising, where the head of the company wants to get in on the act by appearing on screen. This is almost invariably a bad idea. Victor “Remington” Kiam is the obvious example (“I liked it so much, I bought the company!”), but at least he had a bit of spunk about him and a bullish enthusiasm that only American entrepreneurs can muster. José however, is a bit of a spanner and quite visibly, spunk-free.

Colonel Sanders is another example, though the persona created by the advertising agency (a recent ad showed a cartoon version of him breakdancing which I’m sure the real colonel never indulged in) bears little resemblance to the crusty finger-lickin’-chicken-frying ex-military man.

Unlike Victor and the groovy colonel, José has less personality than an ameboa, and is so unpresentably skinny and wooden that every part of him stands perfectly perpendicular to the ground as if he’s been positioned in front of one of his little Lego-style complexes with a protractor. A tall man of disproportionate height and width, his physique is so flat it looks like his immaculately crease-free clothes were ironed while he wore them, and you get the uneasy feeling that if he turned to the side he’d vanish, making him the only two-dimensional individual known to mankind.

“Make sure you pay for your property a fair price” he intones flatly at the end of the ad. I can’t fathom whether his twisted English is ironic scripting suggested by the ad agency to imbue continental personality, or just pisspoor grammar. Either way, I’d be more inclined to give my money to someone who approached me in the street and shouted “My name Crazy Juan and I invitation you to buy one my used cars pliz.”