Posts Tagged ‘commercial’
Vauxhall’s Ad With The X Factor
As an adman, I have to say I love the new Vauxhall commercial, the one for the lifetime warranty. I can see how it’s spot on brief, catching the zeitgeist, truly the first of a new generation of advertising with a different type of offer. It’s designed for these just coming out of recession, hovering on the edge of double dip times. It’s great.
It achieves excellence by obeying the good, old fashioned rules of good old fashioned writing. It attracts your attention, inspires your interest, builds desire for the payoff and creates action at the end. Old fashioned principles with leading edge delivery. That’s advertising at its very best.
I’ll give you an example of the opposite. The X Factor is becoming like Fox News, utterly carried away on its own hype and insensitive to its audience. It knows how to pull my heartstrings and invoke my tear ducts almost at will but as it goes into its own advertising and promotion between the commercial breaks, it loses me. I wander. I write or I go into the other room. When I come back it’s telling me what’s coming up “after the break”. This is insane. I feel cheated, used and abused. I feel that I’m being toyed with and exploited.
In another echo of so many over-inflated advertising egos of the past, I laughed out loud when I saw the double page spread in The Times for Christine and Adrian’s new breakfast show “Daybreak”. This is an utter waste of money. Double page spreads are the creative team’s favourites because there are their words and pictures up in lights, like a poster, unsullied by editorial or other content. They’re the account man’s favourite too because they make for an excellent presentation and impress the client easily. Watch how readers behave. The page gets turned in double quick time. And in The Times? What objective is being achieved for ITV’s marketing strategy? Are readers of The Times part of Daybreak’s target audience? If this is aimed at potential advertisers it is an extraordinarily expensive way of reaching them.
Countless millions are wasted based on the petty pretensions of marketing directors or their advertising agencies. Similar egotistical spendthrifts inhabit TV production. Occasionally though, particularly in Britain, you see beautifully crafted and intelligently written masterpieces of communication. The new Vauxhall ad is one of these.
Cannabis Is Medicine
It seems to be coming of age. This is the first ever TV commercial for medicinal cannabis. This ad first ran on FOX 40 in Sacramento, California in August. Times are changing. The truth will out!
Republicans Reveal True Colours To Brits
The story about the mosque being built at Ground Zero has been bubbling away for a few days. This evening, on BBC Radio 4’s “PM” programme an interview with Scott Wheeler of the National Republican Trust fired my interest. In fact, it made me explode with anger.
To start the interview Eddie Mair, the PM frontman, played a radio commercial opposing the construction of the mosque. The NRT has paid for its production and broadcast. It is outrageous. I think it would probably fall foul of the law here for “incitement to racial hatred”.
Here’s the TV version which uses the same audio track. Setting Brush Fires, a US blogger, found this for me.
I’ll repeat that name for you: Scott Wheeler, of the National Republican Trust. He’s the individual promoting these ideas. If the boot was on the other foot he would now be at 30,000 feet on his way to Guantanamo Bay.
I hope that US Republicans are going to tell me that I’m wrong, that he’s a bit of a nutter and he and his cronies are unrepresentative of the mainstream. I hope so because if this is what represents American free speech, for the first time ever, I’m not jealous of their written constitution.
These ideas are every bit as wicked as the preachings of Abu Hamza or Anjem Choudary, the Islamist extremists who have tried to influence Britain. Scott Wheeler is exactly the same but the opposite.
These are the scum of the earth.
Peter Reynolds 