Category archives: Columns

(Not) Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – Beer brands and the Great White Hype

I love the idea of craft beer. But let me unpack that statement so that it’s not just a glib say-so.

Beer is a refreshment that just about everybody loves – easy to understand. But I love the idea of craft – that time honoured tradition of ritual and the observation of sacred practice. That’s why although I wouldn’t label myself the world’s greatest beer drinker; I am passionate about craft beer because it is all about creating something that consumers can enjoy. It is the making of a beverage according to a time honoured tradition or on a small scale or using only the best ingredients.

After years of domination by the SABigboys, in the past few years the local craft beer market has really opened up. Yes we’ve always had craft beer, but for the first time restaurants, pubs and eateries are beginning to understand the complexity and brand opportunity in beer as much as there has been in wine.

Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – You’ve got the power

Given that this is the last ‘Ad of the Week’ for 2012 it feels good to celebrate the power of the individual with an advert that comes to us from Cell C, and which is very reminiscent of those legendary Apple ads, that famous campaign that put the company back on track when it had lost its way.

You know the ads, probably off by heart. But for the sake of nostalgia, let’s read those words again:

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits.The rebels. The troublemakers.The round pegs in the square holes.The ones who see things differently.

They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.Because they change things.

They invent.They imagine.They heal.They explore.They create.They inspire.They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy. How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written?Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people. While some see them as the crazy ones,we see genius.Because the people who are crazy enough to thinkthey can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Now that campaign for Apple – which was called‘Think Different’ because that was the slogan for the ads – was created by TBWA\Chiat\Day in Los Angeles in 1997, a year that Apple Computers (now known simply as Apple) was in trouble. Steve Jobs exited the company following a palace coup in 1985, and what followed for the Apple brand was about eleven years in the wilderness.

Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – Share the gift

The festive season is when advertisers traditionally tug at the old heart strings, and the commercial for Ster-Kinekor’s charity initiative in conjunction with Specsavers, which implores viewers to ‘share the gift of sight’, is no different.

This commercial movie (and yes it is a little movie in that it tells a beautiful story and has impressive cinematic production values) opens on an RDP-styled house somewhere in South Africa. The house has been built on to, so it appears that this family is moving up in the world.

A little boy in school uniform runs into frame, opens the door and tries to sneak past his mum with his head down (as we’ve all done, some or other time in our childhood). This lad is almost home free when guilt gets the best of him. You see him wavering slightly as he’s almost out of eyeshot of his mother, who is cooking dinner because night has fallen and supper time is fast approaching.

The young son, who is wearing the most awesome black hipster glasses, turns and walks towards his mother and looks her straight in the eye. It is then that the viewer clearly sees that one of the lenses of the glasses he is wearing is missing.

The mother is furious of course, because the shiny new glasses must have cost a fortune. She scolds him as he remains silent, and then she demands to know what happens. As soon as he’s mustered the word about who has the other lens, mum leaves the cooking and drags her son off to get his missing lens back.

Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – ads that make you feel good about paying tax

At the best of times paying tax is seen as a necessary evil, but when politics is so highly contested – as it is right now – paying tax becomes a highly emotional issue. Locally tax payers are horribly over-burdened and the tsunami of news about government corruption and wasteful expenditure hardly endears those who fill up the state’s coffers to SA’s revenue collection entity.

This is what makes marketing the SARS brand such a massive challenge. Our country’s revenue collections service is among one of the most efficient state departments, but the funds it collects are not being well spent by government which is a major irritation for tax payers.

But City Press editor, Ferial Haffajee, penned the perfect column a couple of weeks ago called ‘Tjatjarag: Sars adverts help soothe nascent taxpayer resentment’, which talked about what a wonderful government organisation SARS is, and how it is even the subject of a Harvard case study.

“The agency is South Africa’s most efficient and innovative, and is always held up as a public-service model,” writes Haffajee. “The effective collection of tax has been a steady story of governance success. Under former tax commissioner Pravin Gordhan, and now under his successor Oupa Magashule, tax compliance has taken the country from a state of high delinquency to one of high compliance.”

If you read a paper called ‘The power of politics: The performance of the South African Revenue Service and some of its implications’, by Laïla Smith of the Centre for Policy Studies, you’ll understand why this is the case. SARS, says Smith, appears to be one of the success stories of post-apartheid government. “In a context in which the failure of the state to elicit citizens’ compliance with public obligations is seen as a central weakness of the new democracy, and in which the efficiency of government is seen by many analysts to be wanting, the statutory tax collecting agency has substantially increased its revenues.”

Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – Ramsay’s meaty new campaign

Gordon Ramsay is back on South African television screens, but this time the British celebrity chef is not telling failed restaurateurs to “fuck off”, he’s checking Checkers’ racks.

“Checkers reckons their butchery’s top notch,” says the legend who holds an incredible 12 Michelin Stars. In the advert he’s carrying in a whole lamb on his shoulder into what looks like a pristine gourmet kitchen. You don’t immediately see that the chef carrying in the carcass is Ramsay, so there’s a big surprise when that meat hits the wooden cutting board, and that unmistakable, self-assured tone growls at you.

“Well, let’s see what they’ve got,” Ramsay asserts over music that sounds just like ‘Misirlou’ a folk song popularised first by Dick Dale and the Del-Tones, and then by Quentin Tarantino when it was used in “Pulp Fiction”. Viewers of the chef’s compulsive US reality show, Kitchen Nightmares, should find it familiar because ‘Misirlou’, a wild, rebellious soundtrack was used with that show. The makers of Ramsay’s television programmes have always made astute choices for their soundtracks, and the Checkers butchery commercial is no different.

Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – Insurance advertising that doesn’t suck

For the longest time in the history of advertising, insurance commercials were awful. The usual fare in this category used to include a washed-up actor (or former television news presenter) droning on about what would happen if one suddenly died and left the wife and children all alone (with the wolves knocking at the door). The punch line would be how Dead Dull Insurance Co was the answer to life, death, the universe and funeral bills.

If you weren’t being destroyed by guilt, you’d be spurred on by fear – that other classic marketing staple. These insurance adverts usually included children and the grim reaper, although Mr Reaper wasn’t always cast in a starring role. The hooded figure with the large, scary sickle was often off camera, but cast a long enough shadow to let you know he was lurking. These ads were more frightening than anything featuring Jason, Freddy or a Jesuit priest called Father Damien Karras.

Thankfully, most thankfully, insurance advertising has become a little more inventive, creative and even funny of late. Financial services companies have (at last) realised that buying insurance is a grudge purchase and that there are better ways of plying this type of product than trying to freak people out.

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