The advert
In October 2007, Marmite released a television advert featuring Paddington Bear, made in the classic stop-motion style of the original 1970s BBC series. Paddington, in his duffle coat and hat, picks up a Marmite and cheese sandwich, tries it, and declares it “really rather good”.
A passing seagull objects. Chaos follows, in the way that chaos follows in Paddington stories. The ad ran in autumn 2007, generated a respectable amount of attention, and then quietly disappeared.
Why this caused a row
Paddington Bear, as anyone who has read a Paddington book will know, is a marmalade enthusiast. Specifically, he is a marmalade enthusiast. Cut marmalade, from a jar, on toast, ideally in a sandwich kept under his hat for emergencies. This is not a peripheral character trait. It is, structurally, the first thing you learn about Paddington in the original books.
Marmite, with respect, is not marmalade. The two are, gastronomically and morally, opposite ends of the spread spectrum. Marmalade is sweet, bitter and orange. Marmite is salty, savoury and dark. The two are not interchangeable, and they are certainly not interchangeable in the diet of a fictional bear whose entire literary identity rests on his unswerving allegiance to one of them.
So the Marmite advert showed Paddington apparently abandoning his core principle, on television, in a paid endorsement. The Paddington community noticed. Michael Bond, the author, was reportedly quite cross.
The Bond statement
Bond did the right thing. He issued a public statement reminding everyone that Paddington’s first love was, would always be, marmalade. The Marmite sandwich was, in Bond’s view, an unfortunate one-off. The licensing deal was not renewed.
This was the correct response. Paddington’s marmalade loyalty is a load-bearing fictional truth, and an ad agency does not get to overwrite it for a season of TV spots, no matter how charmingly the stop-motion is animated. Bond’s quiet authorial intervention preserved the character. Credit to him.
The advert itself was actually quite good
The funny thing is, judged purely as a piece of advertising, the Paddington Marmite ad was a good ad. The stop-motion was lovingly done. The seagull was a nice piece of slapstick. The sandwich looked properly buttered. If it had featured any character other than Paddington Bear it would have been a perfectly successful Marmite campaign.
But the Marmite team picked the wrong bear. There are bears in British children’s literature who would have been perfectly happy to try Marmite. The Berenstain Bears, possibly. Rupert the Bear, certainly, at a pinch. Paddington was the one bear in the lineup whose published works specifically and repeatedly establish his single-minded devotion to a different spread.
What is left of it
The ad still exists somewhere on the internet if you want to track it down. The original stop-motion animator deserves credit for technical work that holds up. Marmite have, sensibly, not tried this trick again with another beloved fictional figure.
And Paddington, undamaged, has gone on to two enormously successful film adaptations in which his marmalade habit is foregrounded, and one in which he infiltrates the Royal Family on a marmalade pretext. Marmalade has won. As it should.
Source: the Guardian, the Independent, October 2007 archives.
