Is This Eurostar Advert About Staying Up Late, Doing a Ton of Cocaine?

“wait do u think they did that on purpose [sic],” reads the latest message on my ‘Zante 2k17’ WhatsApp group.

It’s accompanied by a smattering of those emoji that imply you’re laughing so hard you’ve begun to cry. I doubt it’s actually that funny, I think to myself. I doubt whatever “they” have done (it’s either sexually suggestive or to do with drugs) was intentional.

I’ll have a quick look, though. I might as well.

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Lo and behold, it’s a Eurostar advert. Lo and behold… Oh, fair actually. It does look a lot like someone’s racking up a line of coke. Yeah, fair enough. Smattering of emoji back. “Lol wtf [sic].” “nah that must be an accident loooooooool [sic].”

Earlier this year, the crazy (French?) kooks at Eurostar got together with the lads at adam&eveDDB and Noma Bar to devise the “Reasons to Eurostar” campaign. Somehow, this is the first I’d seen of it, but then I don’t travel on Eurostar very often. “Seat 2B or not 2B,” reads the copy on one of them. That’s a reference to Shakespeare but also seat numbers like you’d get on a train. Genius. “Time flies when you don’t,” says another. Because you’re not, like, flying? Like you would on a plane? You’re on a train. It’s all quite run-of-the-mill and “funny” in the way that a lot of copywriting is until the “is-that-a-drug-reference?” one.

“Maybe 6am trains are too early,” reads the copy. Below, a hand holds what appears to be either a ticket or a bitter-tasting provisional driver’s license that’s been made to look like a train, presumably the Eurostar. Next to that there’s a thin white line that looks like, yeah, a line of coke.

It’s multilayered. I’d love to see the ‘alternative text’ for it. Can alternative text imply subtext? It probably should? So as to give a blind person a little pick-me-up? Maybe that’s patronising for me to say. Like, if you’re born blind, that’s all you know. I wonder if someone who was born blind would be able to understand this Eurostar advert if you explained it to them. How many blind people even take cocaine?

I wonder how they’d do the Braille for the Eurostar coke advert.

My instinctive first response to this was to assume that it had something to do with Paris. Is it a nod to all the fashion-y, coke-loving types going to Paris Fashion Week? I like it. I can see that narrative floating around a meeting room at Eurostar HQ. Heads nodding and Paris being described as “cosmopolitan” on more than one occasion. But my issue is that it sorely excludes all the people getting on the Eurostar to go to, say, Belgium?

Belgium doesn’t have a coke-y vibe. Belgium is chocolate and beer and people over 35 years old. If the ad is saying that everyone heading to Belgium has just finished up with a big coke bender, then it’s just really depressing, like the old FRANK advert where all those drugs are being smuggled via a dead dog’s stomach cavity. Not a video that goes down too well when you’re five or six hours’ deep into an afters.

Let’s not think about dead dogs or cokeheads going to Belgium. Let’s just say that the ad is directed at all the beautiful, young coke dabblers going to Paris. For whom coke isn’t, like, a proper issue.

“Change your ticket up to an hour before departure,” reads the copy at the bottom. That may suggest one of two things have occurred, bender-wise. The first is that you stayed up until maybe 2AM sniffing coke. You’re now regretting booking that 6AM train because, with the commute to St Pancras, you’re looking at a maximum of three hours’ sleep. But that’s not really a bender, is it? It’s also not the nature of coke. You don’t seal up the baggie halfway through, only 25 minutes into Jeff Buckley Live in Chicago. (I’m so glad it’s on iPlayer now.)

Scenario two. You’re getting a bit carried away, it’s just line after line, then you look at the clock and shit: you’ve only got an hour and a half until your train to Paris. “Better change my train to a few hours later,” you’d think. “I’m so glad I saw that advert for the Eurostar where it looks like they’re racking up a line.” And then you’d just… keep going? Do little keys all the way up to the Eurostar security?

That’s arguably more depressing than going to Belgium.

I’m really chuffed that my birthday celebrations tend to fall on the night in October when the clocks go back. When the dawn chorus begins and I look at my phone expecting to see that it’s 7AM, I’m always pleasantly surprised to see that I’ve gained an hour. That’s to say that I’ll probably never miss a Eurostar train. Regardless of the amount of coke consumed.

“i dont think they can legally do that lol [sic],” is the response that I finally offer to Zante 2k17. What I don’t say is how impressed I am by the way the ostensible line of coke tapers at one end, as if it’s in the process of being shaped by an over-excited 29-year-old you’ve invited back from the pub, and the accuracy with which this speaks to the nature of coke consumption. And how deft is it that these innovative creatives may have done all this through the medium of minimal graphic design? Via something that looks like a simple rendition of a train ticket?

“did u see this tho i sent it to you on reels [sic] [crying laughing emoji],” pings another message. I think it’s that video of the Michael Jackson lookalike watching another Michael Jackson lookalike do the moonwalk. I’ll have a quick watch of that.

@amberrawlings