Monday, March 31, 2008

A hiding to nothing



So the new Cadbury ad is here, and the knives are out.

My opinion? In the circumstances, it's as good as it could have been.

A big part of what made Gorilla so effective was its novelty. Not just the freshness of the 'glass and a half full of pure joy' strategy, but the sheer audacity of spending 85-odd luxurious seconds focussed on something so simple. Any further executions that stuck to that formula were bound to feel slightly familiar.

As if that weren't enough, both the central idea ("trucks having fun") and the fact that there'd be another mawkish 80s soft rock soundtrack were revealed in advance.

Imagine if, before you first watched Gorilla, you knew you were about to watch 90 seconds of an animal playing the drums, and that the thought that tied it back to the product was "joy".

It wouldn't have felt anywhere near as fresh.

Personally, it missed a little bit with me, for a fairly stupid reason that I only relate because it illustrates just how irritatingly arbitrary viewer reactions can be:

Not being familiar with the song, I spent the whole first viewing trying to figure out who the familiar-sounding band was. I only clicked that it was Queen when the guitar solo started, and spent the next two viewings wondering whether there was ever another guitarist with quite such a distinctive signature tone as Brian May.

1 comment:

notahobby said...

I love your Blog. I love good advertising and have had a life long fascination of why people buy anything, and or HOW to make people buy anything. If anyone hasn't mentioned it, you are very smart and your love of words is evident in every post. In a vast wasteland of brainless blogs yours is a breath of fresh air.