Sold?: Evian’s Roller-Psychos
Breakdancing, roller skating CGI babies. That’s why I look to adverts for realism.
Evian’s latest attempt to connect with the viewer and hone in on the marketing equivalent of a roofie (numbs you into submission, constantly in demand etc) shows a bunch of roller skating toddlers jiving and leaping at chain fences in their exuberance.
The babies dancing around on roller skates are intensely creepy. Part of the ad when the babies jump and hang on to a metal link fence looks like it’s from a horror movie, some sort of Children of the Corn prequel. Babies of the water?
Chances are this ad was made by some die hard Ally McBeal fan that couldn’t quite let go of the dancing baby scene. But how to update it?
‘Ally McBeal hasn’t been on TV for years. What do people like these days?’
‘Hip hop. The kids like hip hop.’
‘But are the kids going to be the main buyers of Evian?’
‘Like it matters. It’s a dancing baby, who wont love that?’
Answer: anyone who’s seen it.
The tenuous link the ads trying to make between babies and vitality is pointless because anyone who’s ever been around knows that they’re not full of vitality. They’re full of poop.
Sold?: Coca Cola’s Animal Organ
I’m all for creativity when it comes to advertising. And of course the more “out there” the premise, the more memorable the ad. But as this new publicity for Coca Cola just goes to show you can fall foul of trying a bit too hard.
I can almost imagine them brainstorming this idea, possibly having opened up a few big tins of varnish and turning off the air-con, just to get them in the “creative mood.”
“Yeah, and he’s pushing this, like, organ thing up to the top of the hill….”
“And he’s, like, where the Tellytubbies live dressed like a Victorian wizard.”
“Oh my God, I can see little furry monsters singing.. and it’s, like beautiful.”
“Quick, open the window, I want to fly to my house!”
Or maybe the acid-tinged scenes are a reference to the effect the drink has on kid’s teeth?
The up-side to the ad is clearly the groovy new tune composed especially by Calvin Harris which helps take some of the edge off the cynical hijacking of freewheeling psychedelia and good vibes to push a tooth-rotting brown syrup onto artless youngsters.
But of course, that’s what they WANT me to think…
Sold?: Bud Light? Hard (Core) more like
Conservative American media is up in arms at the airing of a viral Bud Light advert in which a guy attempts to buy a porn mag (‘Tongue in Cheeks’) at the same time as a six-pack of his favourite brewski.
Unlikely but amusing coincidences unfold into a Larry David-esque cringe-fest involving an old female colleague, a free vibrator and a hold-up which ends with the hapless bloke on the national news dubbed “local porno buyer”.
Well as the old joke goes – I build a thousand bridges, but do they call me Paddy the bridge builder? No. But you shag one sheep…
Time magazine have said that the ad marks “some kind of cultural tipping point, where pornography has soaked so far into the fabric of mainstream culture that it’s no longer seen as a stain” but surely that’s a massive over exaggeration.
The very point that buying porn is taboo is what makes the joke funny. If this weren’t seen as risqué endeavour, there’d be no joke.
Regardless of its appropriateness, Bud aren’t saying “Our consumers like porn”, they’re saying “Our consumers might remember this because it’s funny” – that’s how viral marketing works.
Surely the biggest question is why he was buying a magazine in the first place, when everyone knows and long-running West End/Broadway muppet musical Avenue Q so merrily sings “The internet is for porn”.]
If that wasn’t controversial enough, how about this entirely brain-dead advert for Oven Pride that’s been labelled the ’sexist advert ever made’? Check out our regular Sold? column for more amusing and litigation-enraging adverts….
Sold?: Oasis Call On The Services of a Giant Rubber Duck
June 11, 2009 by Jack Marland
Filed under - Home, Features, Sold?, Videos
With so many competing mediums these days, ads have really got their work cut out for them.
No longer can you get away with singing the name of the product over a few glockenspiel chimes. If it’s not a drumming gorilla or a giant waterslide ride home, the public just ain’t going to sit up and take notice.
So it’s in that spirit, I imagine, that the makers of Oasis fruit drinks have employed the services of Read on….
Sold?: Oven Pride Ad Gets Men Fired Up!
For years women have had to endure sexism in the form of ludicrous Lynx adverts; females everywhere have been encouraged to free themselves from the awkward confines of clothing and chase after men as though they were giant, hulking, edible bunnies – and all over a whiff of deoderant.
After balking at our sensitivity, it seems that (finally) men have been given the chance to sympathise with our position – just take a look at the Oven Pride advert above – with the strapline: “So easy a man can do it”. 663 complaints were received from blokes who thought the advert dismissed them as “stupid and lazy”.
We see the boys’ point – why should cleaning be seen as women’s work anyway – this isn’t the 1950’s. Still, all the more grating was the narrator’s irritating titter at the advert’s close. Suffice to say, we’re never buying Oven Pride.
For other titillating and provocative adverts, check out our regular Sold? column, which includes OTB’s rather satisfying run-down of Durex’s Female Orgasm ad….
Sold? Yes!Yes!Yes! Durex Encourage The Female Orgasm
April 8, 2009 by Sally McIlhone
Filed under - Home, Features, Sold?
Finally! In a world where most men need a compass to find the female fun-button, Durex are shiny, happy, pleasure pioneers.
Witness Exhibit A above, the new ad campaign from Durex Play O “pleasure-enhancing” gel, which features a veritable smorgasbord of outstanding orgasms. Oh My! What a cunning linguist. Ahem. Read on…
Sold?: American Airlines – Kevin Spacey performs the art of wistful sitting
Oh Kevin, how you ponder. How you struggle to find the meaning of the “great seat”. How it plays on your mind as you recline and shuffle and clench your buttocks looking longingly into the middle distance to a tinkley piano soundtrack. But wait…at last! Your struggle is over. Huzzah! Why, pray we ask?
Sold?: How Shirley Bassey made a beer bottle’s life important
There are many times when watching telly that I can’t quite work why the ordinary-looking stuff I’m watching suddenly seems really bloody important. (Don’t say it’s God, it’s not)
Sure, it kind of makes sense when it’s Barack Obama’s inauguration or a documentary about dying children. I even welcome the odd joy-surge when the fictional protagonist of a movie is about to fulfil their lifelong ambition, but when it’s an advert about the journey that a bottle of Heineken takes from the factory to the grips of whoever drinks it and I feel the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up, something’s afoot.
I’m excited…and kind of weirded out. As Captain Zap Brannigan of Futurama might say “Read more now!…”
Sold?: Sky+HD’s moment-y momentous new advert
Those crafty fellas behind the new Sky+HD campaign…they’ve only gone and harnessed the power of what sounds like Bill Nighy’s gravelly voice (is that him?), played it over an urgently grand soundtrack (akin to that musical interlude that Coldplay put in the middle of all their tracks to denote how significant everything is) and created an epiphany of an ad.
Like the victim of Who? Freddie? Jason? The Predator… you won’t know til you have clicked
Sold?: Durex makes condom animals adorable
After seeing these three rubbery creatures rut earnestly in various positions for this new advert by Durex, who could ever look at condoms in quite the same way again?
The guys behind it deserve a big well done for this little treat. They’ve actually succeeded in making a condom ad that doesn’t leave you feeling totally unsexy / slightly grubby afterwards. Ok, so this isn’t exactly the hottest thing in the world but, oh my, it’s adorable.
Just think of the post-coital chats across the globe that will benefit from this piece of condom porn. …Think and click…
