The meaning behind a pre-Christmas perfume advertisement has been successfully decoded for the first time in television history, it has been revealed.
An expert team of academics, working with some of Britain’s top code breakers and cryptanalysts, spent the last seven years studying and dissecting a pre-production commercial for this season’s must-have scent: ‘Labrynthé’ by Dior.
Project leader and leading psychological analyst Professor Derek Stapleford said that his team were ‘over the moon’ to have cracked the code in time for Christmas. ‘It’s a major achievement,’ he told a packed press conference, ‘for the first time we have been able to give consumers at least half a chance to work out just what the hell is going on.’
The announcement is doubly important due to the fact that the Christmas campaign for ‘Labrynthé’ has been billed as the most impenetrable perfume ad to date. ‘A shaved Labrador covered in gold paint being pulled on a trolley through a featureless white room whilst a toddler dressed as Elvis drops jars of marmalade from a giant disco ball, accompanied by an operatic version of the Lambeth Walk, should be enough to baffle Alan Turing, but my team have proved that even this utterly baffling tosh can be cracked at last.’
After comparing the advert with tens of thousands of cultural references, memes and zeitgeists Stapleford and his team spent several months locked in a special room at GCHQ, where the intelligence community’s most top-secret advanced code-breaking techniques were employed to unravel the conundrum.
As the country waited with baited breath, Stapleford revealed that the message behind the ‘Labrynthé’ advert was ‘confusing, surprising, yet ultimately informative’ and meant, simply: ‘perfume smells nice, so buy some for your missus if you can’t think of anything else. Oh, and I’d take that negligée back if I were you…’