Creative impulse

Bartle Bogle Hegarty has come up with a pounds 2m, six-week campaign to promote Electrolux's new Wide Track vacuum cleaner. The 30-second commercial is set in a monastery and features a monk rushing to vacuum the floor - with the Wide Track - under a group of his levitating colleagues before they return to the ground. The strapline, "Britain's fastest floor cleaners", appears just as the monk completes the job. Another ad, for the new Compact Power range, will follow in later weeks.

The client: Electrolux

Richard Chapman, brand manager

We wanted to put over our two main selling features - the first is the 25 per cent wider cleaning head. Vacuuming is not the most exciting or enjoyable of tasks, so we wanted to stress that it does a good, efficient cleaning job. We have received feedback from consumers wanting a lightweight product, and this is the second selling point of the Wide Track. What's more, it still has all the accessories you'd expect.

We are trying to reach ABC1 women between the ages of 25 and 55, and because we put the campaign in place during Euro 96, we have been advertising in places where we would catch women avoiding the football. For this reason, we have been using Channel 4 quite heavily, as well as GMTV.

The agency: Bartle Bogle Hegarty

Rachel Dyson, group director

This is a new kind of product on the market insofar as it has a very wide nozzle for an upright cleaner. It covers much more carpet with one push than other cleaners on the UK market, and it was that fact that underpinned our thinking for the commercial.

We needed to dramatise the fact that this is a wider nozzle than you'd usually find, and that it enables you to do your vacuum cleaning more quickly. So we came up with the idea of the novice monk whose task it is to clean the carpets, and who has to get the job done in a limited time - before the other levitating monks come back down to earth.

This is a classic product demonstration, but done in a different and humorous way. This kind of presentation is unusual in this category, but there isn't any reason why vacuum-cleaner advertising shouldn't be as appealing and amusing as any other kind. Here, we are trying to draw attention to a particular advantage that our brand has over the others.

To be noticeable is doubly important in this sector because people have a low threshold of interest in it. It's not like selling cars, or cosmetics, or even food; products people enjoy buying, because vacuuming is such a dull task. You bung the cleaner away in the cupboard after you've used it and don't look at it because it's a utilitarian thing. But we can't go for utilitarian advertising, we still have to make the product stand out.