Advertising by spectacular is addiction to high stakes gambling
Who doesn’t love the Cadbury’s drumming monkey ad?
It was 2007′s UK TV ad spectacular…
The choc-promoting surrealism of the creative geniuses at Fallon was the most admired and – by reputation – the most successful ad of 2008 by most accounts.
It was of course also a sleight of hand branding move. Cadburys was dogged by the salmonella scandal and its brand value was deemed to have suffered. It’s a strong brand, God knows – it’s one of the few I go goo-ey for at some level, deep down.
Image by Chellbie
That purple. Mmmm. That simple, dependable, uncomplicated milk chocolate that followed me through my childhood. Ahhh. The curly lettered logo that was even on one of my Hornby train carriages. Mmm. Mentions of social reforming and Methodist good intentions in history lessons. Wow. Delicious and on the side of the angels too – what a brand.
Cadburys: Home. Simple, home pleasures. Lovely.
Anyway, that was deemed to be in danger, the story goes. Of course people would forgive and trust the brand again soon enough – it was practically part of the family. But they didn’t trust it as much this quarter as workthe equivalent last year. Sales had fallen.
So, time to bring in a work of genius. A work that would make its creators even more famous. That would win awards.
Out came the drumming man in a monkey suit… and glory shone around.
But what to do next?
The much-antIcipated (by marketers and people who write about marketers) sequel jumped onto the UK’s screens and the web not so long ago. As they’d won big on the monkey, Fallon and Cadburys felt like upping the stakes – they thought this could be bigger…
After the simplicity and straightforward, unexpected lunacy of the monkey that proved so successful, the creatives had reverted to ad industry type (treatment: page one: we open on a [insert exotic location here]) and went nuts with a when-airport-vehicles-go-wild concept set to a Queen track (which I will forever associate with a brilliant scene in Shaun of the Dead).
It was a bit of a let down by the accounts of those who know advertising better than I (Tom Hopkins is as eloquent as ever on the subject, in a post brilliantly headlined One Truck Pony).
It was spectacular alright, but no one was really bothered.
Tom follows up this post with a note about a Facebook ad for, of all things, the Cadbury’s Trucks ad:
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