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Credit Expert
Just a Truffle
TV/Cinema
isadn 82248
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Mrs E Rigby
the voice of common sense
the voice of common sense
Sun 07 February 2010
Sometimes an advert comes along that doesn’t seem to make sense at all. I just can’t make head or tail of this one for Credit Expert. I don’t know if it’s been through any other focus groups but it certainly didn’t come through the one that I do on Thursdays. If it had we’d have had a word or two with them about this advert I can tell you.
It’s just plain daft, that’s what I think – there’s this toffee nosed bloke who comes back to his stately home with a big truffle and pig on a lead. There’s a Chinese man who looks like his butler, and he’s got framed invoices on the wall, and he plays one of those old tinkly pianos and then they just sort of say that his credit rating is solid gold. That’s about it really, and I’m still in the dark.
I think they want you to go and check your own credit rating on their site, which may be a good thing to do, but I don’t understand what the toffee nosed bloke and his truffle, which doesn’t look very good anyway, have got to do with all of this. I just think it’s a distraction and if it had come to our focus group we’d have told them so.
I asked Val who I do the focus group with about it and she said she didn’t get what they were on about, either, but she said it might be to do with that Alexander the meercat who does the adverts for compare the market .com. I didn’t quite understand his adverts either, but he’s been ever so successful apparently, and she thinks all these web sites now want something a bit different.
They don’t care what it is, just as long as it’s different, that’s what she says. Well, this advert is certainly different, and I certainly don’t understand it but I don’t think it’s going to be as successful as Alexander the meercat.
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British Airways
Sun Setting on BA Sale
TV/Cinema
isadn 82258
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Mr Mustard
he's so mean
he's so mean
Sun 07 February 2010
When I first saw this ad I thought for a second that BA had actually gone mad, which for any corporation or public figure in our troubled times, merely means telling the truth.
The ad kicked off with some imagery of sunsets around the world, and that sentimental music that BA have used for years rumbled on in the background, and I was already bored, but then something happened. “The sun is setting on BA…” intoned the voice over, immediately grabbing my attention, before it went on to complete the sentence, “ …’s winter sale.” or something like that, and I was bored again.
I admit that this little sleight of hand did get my attention, but I cannot think that it is a good idea to sail so close to the edge, particularly when BA actually seems to be in such dire straits. If you weren’t paying full attention you might have got the impression that BA was in fact announcing its own demise.
From what I gather, at the moment this is a distinct possibility, and personally I cannot see how they will be able to continue to operate as fatly as they do, in a post credit crunch world. They don’t seem to fly where anyone wants to go these days and they still charge a fortune. They appear to be a business airline, still operating at a time when no one is doing any business, which could be a problem.
They were heavily in debt when they were privatised, and only survived because Lord King, their ebullient chairman at the time, managed to persuade the normally parsimonious Mrs Thatcher to get the tax payer to write off the debt.
Whether they will get another hand out under the present circumstances would seem unlikely, so it might be that we actually do see the sun setting on BA in the next year or two.
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PG Tips Range
When Johnny met Monkey
Mother Ltd
TV/Cinema
isadn 82215
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Dear Prudence
she's out to play
she's out to play
Sun 07 February 2010
They’re not going to let sock monkey and Johnney Vegas retire gracefully are they? I suppose these ads must be working for some people, but I think that they’re a bit forced. I really enjoyed the ads that they did for ITV digital, but these ones for PG Tips don’t half bang on about the product. I mean how long can you talk about the bloody taste? It’s a cup of tea for God’s sake, and not even a very interesting one, it’s bog standard builders, not bad, but nothing special.
They’re a funny couple, monkey and Johnney, and I reckon it’s quite difficult make them seem dull, but they’ve been trying quite hard, what with forcing them to have more and more unlikely conversations about the taste
That being said they’ve pushed this taste thing about as far as it can go in this ad, where monkey has a bloody orgasm as he tries to describe, you’ve guessed it, the taste. It’s a take on that scene in Harry met Sally where Meg Ryan goes off on one in a café, and it’s not bad, certainly better than some of the previous clunkers, though there’s something a bit weird about a sock monkey having an orgasm even if it is only about a cup of tea.
Give them a break, is what I say, at least give them another topic, this one’s completely worn out, not that it had much going for it to start with. Either that or just let them go, it’s starting to look a bit cruel, making them go on like this.
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Vaillant
Thinking Ahead for Bills
TV/Cinema
isadn 82265
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The Fool on the Hill
sees the world going round
sees the world going round
Sun 07 February 2010
“Why Vaillant?” asks someone in this ad for Vaillant at some stage. A perfectly sensible question, but one which is not really answered by the ad. They say a lot of nice things about Vaillant – that they are caring, ecological, energy efficient, all that sort of stuff, but then so does everyone else in the heating and energy business these days.The phrases have been devalued and have lost their meaning in the last few years, and they left me with no real idea why I should choose Vaillant, or indeed who Vaillant were, or even precisly what they do. It looked like any number of flabby corporate ads from operations that have not much to say and nothing special to offer.
The name was vaguely familiar for some reason, I think I saw it on water heaters in bathrooms when I was a child, and I rather think I misread it as Valliant.
I went onto their web site, and found there some quite serious answers to the question ‘Why Vaillant?’ They are German, they basically invented the modern boiler, still seem very clued up in terms of boilers and heating systems, and appear to be of high quality. I am sure that they are not cheap, but I get the impression this is the BMW of boilers. If this is true then it is a very good reason why you should choose Vaillant. It will be very well engineered, it actually will be energy efficient, and it will probably last for years.
Why they have decided not to tell us any of this is a mystery, but in my opinion they have really missed a trick. They have something to say, and have something to offer, so my question goes, “Why Vaillant, have you decided to hide your laurels under a pile of weary platitudes?”
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Leerdammer
Not so Mild
TV/Cinema
isadn 82263
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Nowhere Man
but used to be big in the business
but used to be big in the business
Sun 07 February 2010
Sometime in the 1980s the big multinationals started trying to do multinational advertising. They started blathering on about pan European campaigns, and of course their ad agencies were falling over themselves to try and pretend that they had pan European networks that could deliver this sort of guff.
It was all a bit of bunfight, I can tell. You didn’t get much in the way of decent ads, but you got a lot of foreign jollies, in fact a couple of mates of mine did so much of this sort of thing that they called themselves the European Brown Trouser Alert Squad, or EBTAS.
One of the side effects of this was that we got to see quite a lot of European ads, and they were quite often pretty weird. This ad for Leerdammer reminds me of a number of them. As I recall they went in for quite a lot of pixies and elves back then, often for inappropriate items such as bog roll or frankfurters and they caused no end of trouble.
The clients were telling us to produce new pan European ads, but their local markets weren’t going to ditch their sodding pixies, no way Jose, and we got caught in the middle. As often as not, after endless mind-bendingly dull meetings we ended up with an incomprehensible pan euro pixie compromise.
This ad could be seen as the pixie’s revenge, and I assume that the Dutch(?) clients at Leerdammer have mandated that their pixie ad will go pan European without any cuts or compromises. Whether this new Euro-pixie will shift any cheese, I don’t know, but in my opinion he’s just as mad as he ever was.
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