Rolex said its watch would never change the world

An advertiser argues against its own product

The headline ran across four lines, two of them set large: "A ROLEX WILL NEVER CHANGE THE WORLD. WE LEAVE THAT TO THE PEOPLE WHO WEAR THEM."¹ The first clause withdraws the claim the category usually exists to make, and the second gives it away.

The photograph underneath shows no extreme setting. A man in a white shirt and dark tie sits behind a bank of microphones at what reads as a press conference, one hand on a stand, a yellow gold Oyster Perpetual Day-Date on a President bracelet showing at the cuff. No summit, no cockpit, no dive. The setting is a room in which somebody has to answer for something. The watch is signed off at the foot of the page as Oyster Perpetual Day-Date, above the rolex.com address.¹

The copy names a disposition, not a buyer

The body copy runs eight sentences and never describes the watch. It opens: "There are people who believe that the world moves forward on the back of inspiration and ideas. For them, a day is more than 24 hours." It goes on that a day is an opportunity to make something happen, to make a positive difference.¹

Then the close, which is where the mechanism sits: "They are the people who believe that making a contribution matters. And they find it impossible to go about their lives any other way. These are the same people you'll often find wearing a Rolex. Not because they have to. Because it's who they are."¹

Three things are ruled out in those last two sentences. Not utility, since nothing is said about what the watch does. Not status, since nobody is said to buy it for effect. Not even aspiration, since the reader is not told to become anything. What is left is recognition. The watch is offered as a marker that a certain kind of person already is what they are, and the purchase is described as a consequence rather than a cause. It is also a line written for the model that spells the day out in full: a day being more than 24 hours lands on the one Rolex whose distinguishing feature is the word at the top of the dial.

The claim Rolex makes elsewhere

Rolex is less restrained about the Day-Date on its own pages. Rolex dates the model to 1956, available only in 18 carat gold or platinum, and describes it as the first wristwatch to display the date and the day of the week spelt out in full in a window on the dial, with the President bracelet created for it. It calls the model "the watch par excellence of influential people", and under a heading reading Leadership it writes that its watches "have long been associated with those who have, over time, guided the destiny of the world".²

The two sentences do not sit together easily. The advertisement says the watch will never change the world; the corporate history says the watches are associated with people who have guided its destiny. Both are Rolex's own wording, and the difference between them is the difference between a page written to be read by a buyer and a page written to be read as a record.

The motif also sits awkwardly against the era it belongs to. Chapter, which reproduced the artwork, describes Rolex's advertising from the 1980s onward as turning to more opulent and luxurious motifs that portrayed the watches as the insignia of success, with the Day-Date, the watch it calls the presidential one, at the centre of that turn.³ That is the account of a magazine rather than of Rolex, but the page in question does not behave the way it describes. The gold is there and the bracelet is there, and the copy spends its eight sentences refusing to trade on either.

What moved in half a century

In 1953 Rolex ran a letter from the leader of the British Everest expedition, over his signature, certifying that the Oyster kept time, resisted snow and wound itself, and used the page to introduce the Explorer at a stated price. The evidence ran from the expedition to the watch.⁴

By 2005 the direction had reversed. Nothing certifies the watch; the watch is produced as a detail that certifies a person. The proof has moved off the object and onto the owner, and the advertiser has stopped asking to be believed about the product at all.

The date is the one given by the magazine that reproduced the artwork, which prints a year and no publication. No campaign name, agency or writer was found for it in any permitted source.¹