by Oresti Patricios. KFC is a global brand with a family-focused, everyday food brand promise. Like most fast-food brands, the emphasis is on fun, so most ad messaging uses humour to create a light-hearted feel. The latest ad also manages to sneak in another message: that KFC is also for special occasions.
Category archives: #AdChamps, #AdOfTheWeek & #AdOfTheYear
Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – #lovecapetown
by Oresti Patricios (@orestaki) For many South Africans, and not only those who live there, Cape Town has a special place in their hearts. For many, it’s the ideal holiday destination, and has the proud distinction of being the South African city most foreign tourists want to visit. In fact, Cape Town it is recognised as one of most desired destinations worldwide.
Promoting the Mother City may seem like a dream job, but there is a lot that has to be considered when marketing a city. And when it comes to tourism, most people are more inclined to base their purchasing decision on what they read on a blog or a review site than in conventional channels. What makes this complex is that these days there is a lot of “noise” competing for people’s attention when it comes to making choices of where to go on holiday.
The challenge for marketers is how to cut through the clutter. Cape Town Tourism and its agency has done this quite smartly with the current ‘Love Cape Town’ campaign, an extension of the ongoing campaign that lives under the slogan of “You don’t need a holiday, you need Cape Town.” It includes Facebook competitions, a Twitter angle, blogging promotions and an Instagram competition. The idea is to get a conversation going about the tourist venue in social media, and this strategy has intelligently built the city’s brand over recent years. For this month, being tourism month, the hashtag #lovecapetown has been adopted to bring all the elements of the campaign together.
Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – Can Breakfast Be Two-Gunsy?
by Oresti Patricios (@orestaki) The line between humour and cringe can sometimes be a delicate one – and ideas that look good on the drawing-board can end up falling flat on their metaphorical faces. The Wimpy Breakfast campaign that has been created by DraftFCB is a case in point – it could have been incredibly cringeworthy, because it’s really quite silly. Yet it hits the mark.
The real star is the copy, which is bright and inventive; creating new phrases and terminology that might just make it into the mainstream. The mood of the ad is 100% South African, and the main character is a comedic talent, who plays the opposite of the guy who woke up “on the wrong side of the bed”.
Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – A Wallet for all Reasons
by Oresti Patricios (@orestaki) For the middle-to-upper classes, who have several accounts, true convenience would be having everything in one place: on their smartphones. The latest ad from MTN, announcing the ‘MTN Wallet’ seems to be aimed at this segment.
Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – Golden Plunger Makes a Splash
Once again, humour rises to the top of the pile for my nomination for ‘Ad of the Week’. Yellow Pages and agency 360eight have launched a new campaign with a splash, and here’s hoping for more in the same vein.
Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – Mnandi-licious
A no-nonsense fast food product that caters to the Everyman, the King Pie brand could retain its crown with a new ad that is fun, watchable and plays strongly to local culture. In terms of advertising, King Pie has been absent from television screens for quite a while.
A part of the South African fast food landscape since the dawn of democracy (which makes the brand 20 years old), King Pie’s ads haven’t always been this great. Previous attempts included a few “candid camera” style scenarios that didn’t quite hit the mark. But I think that this television ad is right on the money: it’s funny, it’s relevant, and it has a clever twist.
Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – Ummm… me, beautiful?
The fashion industry has long been criticised for creating a false set of standards for beauty. Then again, in its defence, one only has to look at ancient statues and paintings – Greece’s Athena, Rome’s Venus – to realise that the appreciation of human beauty is something that is inherent in human nature. Nonetheless, the fashion industry stands accused of creating standards that the vast majority of women are unable to attain; using graphics software to soften every flaw, and even improve physical aspects such as lifted cheekbones, narrowed waistlines and plumped-up lips.
Psychologists say that this has caused many women to have a self-critical outlook on themselves, resulting in a loss of self-confidence and poor self-esteem.
In 2004, after market research indicated that only 4% of women consider themselves beautiful, Dove launched its Campaign for Real Beauty, originally produced by Ogilvy & Mather Brazil. It started off as a billboard campaign that featured ‘regular’ women photographed by Annie Liebowitz: the public were invited to vote on whether a particular model was “fat or fab” or “wrinkled or wonderful”… the votes being updated in real-time and displayed on the billboards.
Unilever, the owner of Dove, also published a study into women’s sense of self and identity. The study was aimed at creating “a new definition of beauty [which] will free women from self-doubt and encourage them to embrace their real beauty.”
Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – Satirical ads sell the Times
Newspapers have come under increasing pressure recently. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), circulation figures are falling year-on-year for most dailies and weeklies. The exception is, of course, the so-called ‘vernacular press’, with titles like Isolezwe holding firm despite economic pressure.
English and Afrikaans papers have to increasingly compete with digital, and at this stage many of them are in a fight for their lives. Lowe CT, agency for Independent Newspaper’s Cape Times, has produced a spunky radio ad campaign that does a great job (using humour) to market its brand.
Imagine getting people like Helen Zille, Jacob Zuma and Julius Malema to read news articles about themselves. Well, of course, that’s not going to happen, but with the help of impersonators, you can create the desired effect.
The choice of news article is key, and part of the humour is in hearing these voices referring to themselves in the third person. That, and the fact that these impersonators are really top-notch.
Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – you keep your eyes on the road
Mercedes Benz has developed yet another pioneering, high-tech innovation, aimed at improving road safety. Studies show that around one quarter of all serious motorway accidents are attributable to sleepy drivers in need of a rest, meaning that drowsiness causes more road accidents than drinking and driving.
This latest piece of computing wizardry works on several levels to analyse a driver’s behaviour in order to detect if they are getting sleepy at the wheel, and then sound an alarm that brings their attention back to reality.
Of course, just showing this technology would probably induce sleep in today’s low attention-span TV audience, so ad agency Net#work BBDO came up with an amusing take on two ‘Walter Mitty’ type characters. The first features a good looking executive type, who catches his own reflection in the mirror while driving. He’s clearly in love with himself, as each time he looks in the mirror, his gaze lingers a little longer.
The music, a Sinatra/Perry Como-style song (created for the ad by Pulse Music New York) that harks back to the sultry lounge-lizard era, is a ballad about “You’ve either got it or not,” – something that this driver seems to think is the case.
As his hand reaches up to run his fingers through his hair, and you’re about to snarl “Keep your eye on the road,” a loud beeping snaps him back to reality. It’s a reality that is a bit of a shock, because now we see that he is, in fact, balding, and maybe slightly older than the ‘mind’s eye’ picture that we previously had of him. The beeping sound was, of course, the Mercedes Benz Attention Assist technology, that picked up the fact that the driver wasn’t paying enough attention to the road, and quickly brought him back to reality.
The byline is: “‘When your mind wanders, ATTENTION ASSIST brings it back.”
Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – Miracle on the Hudson
If this advert doesn’t bring tears to your eyes, or at the very least a lump to your throat, perhaps you need to check yourself in for some psychological observation. It’s rare that an advert gives me a sucker punch, but the new television for Nedgroup did just that. It took my breath away and reminded me of what a powerful story can do to communicate brand values.
Brandlab, with production company Giant Films produced the fantastic high-drama recreation of a story that captured the world’s attention a couple of years ago. It is the story of a dramatic event that made global headlines on January 15 2009, when Captain Chesley B “Sully” Sullenberger made an emergency landing of his Airbus A320-214 in the Hudson River, in New York. The ad celebrates this veteran pilot’s heroic and professional actions in the face of extreme danger, actions based on rational thinking and experience that saved the lives of 155 people.
The message of the commercial is: “In the right hands, anything is possible.”
Filmed in New York City, the ad starts with aerial footage over the city, and follows the flight path of the plane. Cut to Capt. Sullenberger, on location on the banks of the Hudson. “It was an ordinary winter’s day,” he tells us. Cut to various scenes of typical wintry New York activity: taxi drivers getting into their cars; kids crossing the street with their teacher; a dancer rehearsing. A plane takes off, and air traffic controllers speak to the pilot of Flight 1549.