Why Is This Ad So Good?
This won the Cannes Grand Prix for film:
I’ve written about it a few times this year, but I think it’s interesting how it’s actually got better with age.
Now with eleven million YouTube views and a fascinating ‘Making of‘, this is a properly big, no-scam event commercial.
And what’s truly astounding in this day and age is that no one has unearthed the YouTube clip from which it was stolen.
Other great things about it:
It’s revitalised a brand we all thought was a joke. I had a haircut a few months ago in a very old-fashioned Turkish barber. Without asking, the guy splashed some Old Spice on and I was quite happy for him to do so. I think a year ago I might have been a bit put out.
It’s by far the best execution in a campaign that was very good, but never reached this level. Executions such as Hungry Like The Wolf were enjoyable, but a little too self-conscious and retro cheesy to be properly good.
It sells. The bloke hold the bottle up and wangs on about it and yet the ad is amazing. Now none of us can complain when we have to do a producty-demo-ey ad.
It’s for PROCTOR AND FUCKING GAMBLE. Supposedly the worst client with the most annoying set of rules has commissioned the best ad of the year. Again, we can have no excuses (This follows a couple of Grands Prix for Dove a few years back).
It’s a new screen: Helmut Krone used to speak of good art direction as creating a ‘new page’ – a layout nobody had ever seen before to make sure it was fresh and therefore intriguing enough to stop you. This is like nothing I have ever seen. It treads a precarious line between irony and bang-on, straightforward sell, but pulls it off brilliantly.
In short, it attempts a triple pike with double-quadruple half twist into a glass of water and succeeds with excellence to spare.
Hats all the way off to everyone involved.
UPDATE: Sorry, while you’re here, is it just me or is the winner of the Titanium Lion pretty woeful?
Totally agree Ben. A properly good ad. It sells hard, ooh look is that the product that he's talking about? Ooh look, it's in his hand. It's the kind of idea that would be sneered at on paper in this country by the too-cool-for-school one trick pony creative brigade. It's one of the reasons that the yanks still have us pegged at this advertising lark; the best US ads are great ads, the ads celebrated as the best UK ads generally aren't really ads at all, just a clever or funny bit of film.
English creatives are like the English football team, full of stars that can't work as a team and therefore can't produce the goods that shine at big events. We can all say there was scam stuff etc but at the end of the day it was a pretty poor show from England. And I think old spice proves you can do great stuff with the product all the way through without having to do some crazy shit for the sake of it. So pull your socks up England and get back on the playing field because at the minute you wouldn't even make the subs bench for Honduras. And that goes for me aswell.
old spice have been doing loads of stuff in america for the past few years, totally re-invigorating their brand 4 d uth.
i also loved the will ferrel stuff and the ppppp-p-power. their sponsorship campaigns to run along side the MLG circuit is great too.
lots of clever clients allowing the creative people to shine. great work all round and proof that tv is alive and kicking.
Ah, we'll give any old rubbish a Titanium gong these days.
The whole old spice campaign is good, not just this ad.
Also, I think there are probably lots of P&G accounts doing good work. The Agency, CDs and local clients mix to make most of it rubbish. The bar is set so low here on that account it's hard to slide a piece of paper under it. They should be ashamed really.
Agree. Love Old Spice. No idea why Best Bloody Buy got Titanium. When I was watching the video, I kept waiting for something interesting to happen. Possibly the most mundane work from Crispin Porter I've ever seen.
the whole thing was done so masterfully and aggressively. they just kicked the medium's ass.
hang on, shouldn't Old Spice have won Film and Titanium (sounding more stupid every year) and, ahem, Cyber and Film Craft GPs? And oh yeah, "integrated". bloody racket.
this won Titanium?
wow, but that's just… well, nothing special.
Half-decent Customer Service as revolutionary advertising. Ho hum.
The real question is, what's up with the design of that web page?
Hang on chaps, Twelpforce is brilliant Рprecisely because it's NOT advertising. Like Hyundai Assurance, it’s a genius business idea. The ads themselves Рthe creative executions Рaren’t great: they don’t need to be. The creativity is in the idea of transforming customer service. So they’ve gone (in their customers’ eyes) from a disliked, faceless corporate giant to a brilliant company staffed by loads of friendly and helpful actual human beings. If I lived in the US, next time I bought an electrical item, I’d buy it from Best Buy because I know if I have any questions about my delivery, the product, how it works, how to set it up, which cable goes into which socket (I always have plenty of these, I assure you,), I’m basically 30 seconds away from help from an actual human being. The reason Twelpforce is brilliant is because it’s bigger than just advertising. The marketing is “baked into the product” as Alex Bogusky would say.
Ant Melder – there's no doubt that it's a good idea. The point is though that since Dell did it in 2007 following the Dell hell debarcle this has become standard practise for all sorts of companies worldwide. The fact that judges thought this is a ground breaking in 2010 is a bit of a worry.
Not sure how on earth Twelpforce won that Titanium but I do know I have just started following them.