ad of the week • Tags • Page 21 of 24 •

Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – Nando’s Hot Old Spice Spoof

Nando’s is renowned for its in-your-face ads that elicit a guffaw, because the brand often rips off popular culture icons and, delightfully, other ads. Last year it took a swing at Santam’s ad demonstrating the fact that we very often miss the details in ads. It did this by surreptitiously changing a background character’s clothing while the main character spoke about insurance clauses.

Santam could have reacted all ‘stuffed shirt’ about this cloned ad, and even taken Nando’s to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), but instead they offered to forgive the chicken people if a delivery of 74 Nando’s meals was made to the Johannesburg Children’s Home. Nando’s complied, but went one better by promising to repeat the exercise once a month for a year. It was a win-win for both brands, and the kid’s home.

Now Nando’s has done a rip-off of that iconic Old Spice campaign, which was called “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”. Old Spice’s campaign was the stuff of legend and inspired reams of advertising case studies. The Old Spice ad became a viral sensation at the time, due to its cheeky, yet self-effacing and wry humour – it was poking fun at itself and an entire category.But more so, it was a pioneering, genre-defining campaign that showed how a brand could be re-invigorated with a clever campaign.

Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – King James II debut

by Oresti Patricios. The Altech mobile campaign was created by King James II, the new Johannesburg agency of the Cape Town-based King James Group.

Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – The big fat sex experiment

Discontented with your sex life? Thinking that perhaps there’s room for improvement? 54% of the world’s population is in the same boat, according to the 2011 Durex Global Sexual Wellbeing Survey.

I have featured Durex in this column before, but that’s because it is a brand that innovates and knows its target market extremely well. It has turned a “tricky” subject (sex) into something that is both fun and open for discussion, mainly through consumer campaigns on campuses. The brand takes an interactive approach to promoting itself as an authority on sexuality, and has a progressive approach to obtaining and sharing information.

Durex has made a priority of “owning” sex, and this campaign is an extension of that philosophy. The 2011 Sex Survey was just the start – now the data is being used for a global “Sexperiment” that aims “to prove that great sex isn’t just about the physical, with experiments designed to explore emotion and intimacy as well as pleasure and passion.”

At the beginning of this month, Durex launched the First Ever Worldwide Sex Experiment. Couples from 26 countries are invited to sign up, and explore their sex lives, with the eventual aim of helping other couples around the world enjoy better sex. The invitation is open to all comers, and is showcased on a dedicated Facebook page.

Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – the cellphone wars

by Oresti Patricios. Cell-C’s latest campaign is being flighted with numbing regularity on SABC and e-TV, promoting the concept of switching networks, while keeping your number.

Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – Savanna, now more can-venient.

Cans, we are told, are more ‘can-venient’, because you can enjoy your Savanna anywhere.

Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – Sta-soft’s ‘tough guys’

Who’s tough? Who’s the roughest, meanest dude you can think of? Chuck Norris? Rambo? Hulk Hogan? If your answer was all three, say “Whoo-hah!”

And what do all tough guys need? Softness, of course, because when it comes to creating an advert to show how effective a fabric softener really is, only the toughest guys make the cut and the tougher you are, the softer you need your clothes to be.

That’s the message from Sta-soft’s new ‘tough guys’ print campaign that uses Sly Stallone, Norris and Hogan look-alikes made out of the softest cloth to drive home the contrast between what’s soft and what’s hard. All kidding aside, I’m glad to see a fabric softener brand go for something a bit cleverer (and a little less obvious) that the usual cute baby (or kitten) to illustrate its USP.

The cloth caricatures in the new Sta-soft ads were created by Shaun Hill of Says Who, a Johannesburg-based branding, design and illustration studio. The fabric versions of the world’s most popular ‘tough guy’ personalities are beautifully rendered through the use of different materials, and the clever use of light and shade which creatively adds to the depth of the ad. O&M is the agency behind this simple but oh-so-effective campaign.

The lack of copy is a notable feature of the ad. Everybody knows the brand; it’s not necessary to labour the features and benefits of the product that almost every South African has grown up with.

Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – hip hop hooray

The origins of hip-hop culture date back to the urban minorities of 1970s USA, when ‘battles’ were introduced as a way of settling neighbourhood scores. Instead of having a gang fight, two crews would face off and compete, either in breakdance, rap, ‘turntablism’ or even graffiti.

Probably most exciting were the breakdance ‘battles’ where different crews would face off and take turns in showing off their breakdance moves. The tradition continues today and can be experienced at hip-hop events, even here in South Africa – mainly in Cape Town, but also in other cities.

DStv’s promotional ads have a history of humour, and of using cultural genres to make a point about the brand and the strength of its content, and the latest ad which features a gangland type face off is no different.

Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – Chris Barnard, again and again and again

by Oresti Patricios. I have to admit to having mixed feelings about this ad… but I still have to give it credit for sheer production value.

Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – a ‘secret gardener’ & the guy who installed swings all over his city, just for the heck of it

In a time when everything revolves around profit, corporate growth and return on investment, it’s good to see a campaign that goes beyond the obligatory corporate social responsibility gambit. But that’s exactly what Coca-Cola’s ‘Crazy for Good’ campaign seems to do.

And thank goodness this agency, Draftfcb, refrains from ‘talking down’ to its market – yes, it’s predominantly a youth market, but gladly they didn’t spell it “kraz-E 4 gud” or some other form of text-speak.

The campaign is all about ‘passing it on’ – people who perform random acts of kindness for the good of society. It’s not a centralised, coordinated effort – rather it revolves around real-life stories that feature people doing a wide range of thingsto benefit their fellow human beings. This is what is so cool about this campaign – it is just about ordinary Joes and Janes with a passion which they use to beneficially impact on the people around them.

This global campaign, which was developed at Ogilvy Brazil, Sao Paulo, highlights these special, giving people, like Zainab Imran, the Pakistani musician who sings and plays at her local children’s ward… despite the fact that she’s visually impaired. What motivates her to give up four days a week to perform for children? “When I sing,” she says, “I feel that the children forget that they are unwell. When they sing and clap their hands, I forget that I’m unable to see.”

Then there’s San Franciscan Jeff Waldman, who installed swings all over his city, just for the heck of it. He was given a $1000 grant by the city of Los Angeles to do the same there; then he ran a Kickstarter fund to hang swings all over Bolivia. They hung them from trees, buildings, rocky outcrops, and even in the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt pan in the world.

Ad of the week with Oresti Patricios: Underdog love story meets So You Think You Can Dance

For many years now, Wimpy has opted for brand oriented campaigns that are highly visual with a strong feel-good factor. In these campaigns the burger people aren’t selling the bun, the patty or the sizzle, they’re selling a brand positioning that’s all about fun.

Way back in 1981 Wimpy had an absurd alien in an equally absurd UFO, coming to Earth to get a burger, only to have his UFO towed for illegal parking. Then there was that ‘free mug’ promotion that had a mug collector showing off his collection, only to have the boom microphone get stuck in the overhead fan, wreaking absolute havoc and destroying the whole collection, candid camera style. And who can forget “I love it when you talk foreign” – the spot that promoted Wimpy’s barista-style coffees? That particular TV ad achieved a massive word-of-mouth factor – at the time everyone was ‘talking foreign’ and mouthing the words: ‘Cremachino, café mocha, and macchiato.

Wimpy has a long history in South Africa. The first store was opened in 1967 in Durban, and over the years it became SA’s de facto burger joint, and a part of our national fabric. In those early days one could buy a burger, chips and coke for a mere 60c. Bought from the American mother company in the late 70s by Bakers, it was later sold to Pleasure Foods, who in turn sold the chain to Famous Brands. In 2007 Famous Brands would go on to buy the struggling UK chain of Wimpy restaurants as well.

Since then, extensive rebranding has taken place to unify the SA and UK brands. The bold red-and-white logo is complemented in the UK by ‘Mr Wimpy’ – a big-headed character in what looks like a beefeater outfit, with a red skirt, floppy red hat and medals. Somehow I don’t think we’ll be seeing him here, but then again, I don’t think Wimpy needs a mascot because its local ads are such a hit.