Be adventurers
Wherever the road may lead you
It’s an ad for Hilton Hotels.
There’s something odd about this. Correct me if I’m wrong,
but aren’t adventurers people who scale ice-encrusted mountains and sleep in
tents while the mother of all blizzards rages outside? Who sail the mighty oceans singlehandedly
in small vessels with even smaller cabins, and have only dried rations to eat because
there isn’t room for normal food? Who attempt to walk from the Arctic Circle to the geographic North Pole faster than anybody else, ignoring the
pain and general inconvenience of frostbite while keeping a careful look out
for hungry polar bears?
That being the case, I think it reasonable to propose that staying
in a posh hotel does not endow a person with the status of adventurer – not unless
he happens to be sleeping with the head chef’s wife, and he knows that the head chef
knows he’s doing it, and he realises that the average head chef has a large
number of pretty impressive knives within easy reach, and he remembers that the
head chef once spent twenty years in a maximum security prison for eating the
liver of the last person who slept with his wife… Which isn’t very likely, is
it?
Hype is an integral part of the adman’s armoury, but there’s
rational hype and irrational hype, and this is definitely of the latter kind.
Isn’t that reason enough to give Hilton Hotels a wide berth?
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