Good Ad Bad Ad; Melody FM Mustoe Merriman Herring Levy
In which a leading advertising expert picks some of the best and worst around.This week, Dave Buonoguidi, joint creative director at St Luke's, on television commercials high and low
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Your support makes all the difference.With TV ads, when someone has been previously successful in some style or other, everyone else tends to say: "Let's do that - it worked for them". The current craze is for trying to tell a story in 30 seconds, with a punchline, which is just soul-destroying. What people should be saying is: "That worked for them, but let's try to do something different." This ad is different, and really stands out.
It features samples of four records gradually layered on top of one another and matched to visuals of different people listening to their radios. There's first a woman stuck in a traffic jam listening to Sail Away by Enya, and then other images start appearing to the left and right of it. We see a couple on a sofa listening to Nat King Cole's When I Fall In Love, and then a woman relaxing in a bath to The Man with the Child in his Eyes by Kate Bush. Finally, Vincent by Don McLean is added to the mix, listened to by a man cutting his hedge.
There's no crappy gag, and the brand comes across as being really confident about what it is. I know how difficult it is to advertise an aural medium; we handle Radio 1's advertising. But this works so well that it really made me want to listen to Melody FM. It's a shame that the visuals are not quite as strong as the sounds, but overall the effect is quite mesmerising, which is pretty much unheard of in advertisingn
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