Is this the most honest piece of advertising ever made?

There's a claw machine sitting in Moco Museum in London right now, and inside it hangs an authentic Hermès Birkin bag worth over £10,000. You're invited to play. Interested? Well, who wouldn't be? 

There's just one problem. You will not win. The game is, by the creators' own cheerful admission, completely and utterly rigged.

The installation is called PAIN. It was made by Uncommon Creative Studio, and it has arrived in London just in time for Fashion Week. And I want to make the case that this is one of the most honest pieces of communication our industry has ever produced. More honest perhaps than many of the best adverts ever made or even the best rebrands.

Advertising usually lies. This doesn't

The central premise of most advertising is a fiction: that buying this thing will make you happier, more attractive, more successful, more complete. The gap between promise and reality is the engine of the entire industry. And those of us who work in it have learned not to look at it too directly.

PAIN does the opposite. It takes the fundamental logic of aspirational marketing (desire, proximity, the tantalising sense that the good life is just within reach) and makes it viscerally, uncomfortably literal. 

The Birkin is right there. You can see it. You can almost touch it. You have absolutely no chance of taking it home. The game is rigged. It always was. Uncommon just had the nerve to say so out loud.