Nothing brings home the passage of time as strongly as Christmas. It seems only yesterday that I was packing the decorations away in the loft, and yet here we are again, ready for turkey-with-all-the-trimmings and our annual dose of The Great Escape on TV.
Many, if not most, of us will find ourselves slumped in front of the TV at some point over the festive season, but I wonder how many of us will have received a Nikon digital camera in our Christmas stocking.
I’ll hazard a guess that not many timber traders will have made the investment following Nikon’s series of television advertisements in which they capture a potential moment of time in the future. Those moments include the first AIDS vaccination, the first three-minute mile by a woman and ‘the last rainforest’. The latter point is illustrated by a shot of a timber yard.
Nikon’s group marketing manager claims the company does not have a view on timber and that the advert is not meant to imply whether timber use is good or bad. ‘The last rainforest image will mean different things to different people,’ he said. ‘Well, quite,’ is our response.
However, the TTJ readers who brought the advert to our attention were incensed not just by the implied environmental slur, but by the fact that the timber on show is clearly softwood.
This is the sort of misinformation that the timber trade has been dealing with for years and it’s fortunate that it’s now being tackled head on by the new wave of timber marketing campaigns. However, it’s also fortunate that Christmas will soon be a distant memory and Nikon’s advertising campaign will probably be consigned to the metaphorical loft along with the decorations.
In line with our usual Christmas publishing schedule, this is our last issue of the year (we publish again on January 12), so it just remains for me, on behalf of everyone at TTJ, to wish you all a happy Christmas and new year.
