Tag: Advertising (page 1 of 2)
Does any of this look familiar to you?
I have to admit it does to me. Of late I’ve become more and more aware of how frequently I check various social networks and apps on my iPhone.
Oddly I’ve found it’s the times I didn’t have the phone with me that made me most aware of when I would have checked it. It’s almost unconscious; standing in a queue – reach for the iPhone, waiting for the kettle (at work not home) to boil – reach for the iPhone. I have clearly formed a habit.
On a recent day out I hadn’t charged my iPhone and so my use of it was dramatically limited. My wife commented that it was “nice to have me there” and I could only agree – it was much more relaxing and rewarding to fully “be there”.
But I digress. I clearly fully recognise the the syndrome this advert describes, but I don’t see how it works to promote a new smartphone. I’ve read that it is targeted at non-smartphone users, but don’t see how will highlighting behaviour that is a potential annoyance to that audience will encourage them them to buy a smartphone, and quite possibly become a heads-down smartphone user.
That being said – it is a great ad.
I was saying just the other day that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a really great advert. Well I’ve just seen the best ad I’ve seen in a long time: Write The Future from Nike.
Sure it’s a huge budget epic full of over-paid footballers, but it captures the passion and the nail biting tension of the 90th minute brilliantly.
As a friend used to say “it only takes a second to score a goal”.
Viewers of the UK TV station ITV have voted for the advert of the decade, even though technically this decade doesn’t end until the end of 2010, but what’s another year between friends. The winner was the excellent ‘Go On Lad’ from Hovis:
I was going to challenge this, and say that they were wrong, all of them, wrong, and that the best advert of the decade was St George from Tango, but I’m alarmed to find that this advert dates back to 1997 – the decade before. Time flies and all that…
Anyway here now is the advert of the previous decade; St George from Tango:
I saw this at the cinema last night – brilliant!
Volkswagen have had consistently brilliant TV adverts for as long as I can remember, but Night Driving is one of their finest.
The ad is beautifully shot, and Richard Burton’s narration of Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas works so well with “ Don’t Blow It” from Cliff Martinez’s Solaris soundtrack that it’s as if they were written for each other.
I will admit to having watched this advert more than once whilst I was waiting for my new Golf to be delivered.
The full text of Under Milk Wood is available from Project Gutenberg, but here are the sections used in the ad, although you may not sound quite as sonorous as you read it.
And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.
Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cockle-women and the tidy wives.
Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organ playing wood.
You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing.
Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep.
I love night driving, especially around London as the city comes to life, but then just as quickly falls asleep.