A billion and two
Ads like Lynx’s 'Billions' really show the gulf between advertising for men and that supposedly crafted for women. These days women get lumbered with self-righteous feminist ads - like Dove's recent offerings that are quite frankly, as dull as the dishwater our sixties sisters so fought to get their hands out of. Men meanwhile get beautifully produced and intensely erotic fantasy epics. Hardly seems fair does it? 'Billions' is a great ad but it’s even better when you add just two more women (from an old and rather awful Impulse deodorant ad) to really bring out some Amazonian desires. And then wham, bam you've got an ad for women that's actually, for once, slightly more exciting than sitting in a library reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex.
Where the bloody hell are they?
A while back there was minor uproar in the home-counties at the use of the word 'bloody' by the Australian Tourist Board in their latest ad. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m no purist but maybe they should re-consider their tag line – not because of the mild expletive but because so many people go missing in the bloody outback.
Where the bloody hell are you? Wolf Creek maybe…
On the money
According to The Guardian, "Virgin has been forced into an embarrassing U turn after a new viral advertising campaign backfired spectacularly. The company had asked readers of b3ta.com, an online community known for bad taste jokes, to create a new advert for the Virgin Money brand. Hundreds of entries were submitted, but last week the company pulled the competition from the internet after concerns over some of the submissions." What a waste of time. They wanted an edgy campaign for Virgin money? Well why didn't they just extend Miss Moss’ contract to include their money as well as their mobiles. A perfect product fit surely...
Piping down
A while ago, someone in the advertising industry sat up and said “Hey, now here’s a thing, why don’t we stop bombarding people with messages and try instead to engage them in an open, honest conversation. The consumer is not a moron. They are intelligent people. So let’s talk to them in an intelligent manner, adult to adult. Let’s discuss the issues they care about.”
Yeah. Funny how that ‘conversation’ always dries up as soon as anything goes wrong. Like AOL before them, BP haven’t yet released the above.
Rabbiting on
Segmenting your consumer base using animals must have sounded like such a great idea. Really cool and whacky. People really relate to animals. Just think of Nemo. And those marching penguins. What a cracking idea. And maybe it would have been, if that is, the packages Orange offered had any connection whatsoever with the animals used to represent them. Call me stupid but since when did a racoon call landlines? I watched Wildlife on 1 for years and I’ve never seen a racoon use it’s little paws to dial a landline number. And since when did a panther want ‘all the extras?’ Panthers want to sit in trees. They want to kill deer. So aside from the fact that the animals themselves look like the kind of naff tattoos you get done one drunken night in Ibiza and regret five years later when you can’t remember why the hell you choose to get a soppy looking dolphin etched across your mid-rift, these animals don’t tell me which package I should relate to at all.
Accidents On-Line
Well, if you do design a campaign that openly invites discussion about the pros and cons of the internet then it’s only right that you present both sides of the argument properly.
For richer or for poorer
American Express go to great lengths to convince us that the successful, committed and talented people of this world who get to the tops of their professions, rely on American Express. Tiger Woods, Robert de Niro, Kate Winslet, the list goes on - and I with my 9-5 dead-end paper pushing job feel duly humbled and unworthy of a card… until, of course I see who really gets accepted for their most prestigious and premium of cards.
Love is in the air
Coke’s unshakeable belief that consuming a drink with enough calories to save three undernourished children in the third world, will somehow none the less inspire people to feel love on a global scale, has taken on rather sinister new undertones given recent world events. Call me cynical but wasn’t national security almost breached by some rather potentially explosive chemicals disguised as innocuous bottles of liquid? And weren’t all opened bottles of drink banned from flights not so long ago since they posed potential security threats? Suddenly bottles of Coke and worldwide, group-hugging love doesn’t seem a convincing connection anymore - especially given that Coke is probably the most recognisable American brand in the world. The flowery rays emanating from it’s ‘Love’ bottles now look a little too much like an explosion for comfort…
Coke Zero Imagination
Now given that the majority of creatives in this industry are blokes aged 20-35 you’d think one could expect some level of creative ingenuity and original insight in advertisements aimed at oh, say 20-35 year old blokes. But no. Not only is the advertising for new ‘Bloke Coke’ tamer than a fluffy poodle puppy named Trixable-Bluebell the third but it’s also made up of the kind of hackneyed lines only found in diabolical mid-afternoon ABC sitcoms. If you’re going to go down the ‘it’s a man’s world’ route you should at least have the balls to do it with some fricking impact.
