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New Soreen campaign from resilient Red Brick Road, A&E SSE ad divides opinion, another Virgin Media fail

***Venerable British malt loaf brand Soreen (a squishy European-type bread thingie that you spread with butter – I rather like it) is running a new £3m campaign through The Red Brick Road.

Which sounds like quite a lot but its sales, through new owner Samworth Brothers, amount to about £30m a year – so why not?

And it’s a perky little number.

It’s good to see TRBR hanging in there. The agency was founded by Sir Frank Lowe to handle Tesco, which it did for many years. Then, after Frank left, it was on the verge of being acquired by WPP (Sir Martin Sorrell has been after the Tesco account for decades) until, right at the death, Tesco announced an account review. Cue no WPP and disappointed shareholders.

Which should have been the kiss of death. Not so apparently. TRBR also handles newly-floated online takeaway ordering outfit Just Eat, which is spending buckets at the moment. So well done TRBR.

***There’ve been a few good campaigns this week – just when you were about to give up on British adverts – but few have divided opinions as much as agency-of-the-moment adam&eveDDB’s new orangutan epic for energy firm SSE. One senior agency exec told me it was totally barmy of SSE (given the current popularity levels of energy companies) to run an ambitious ‘feel good’ ad which clearly cost a fortune to produce.

I get the point but..isn’t that what brave campaigns do?

Mind you, as my friend pointed out, it’s interesting that YouTube comments on the ad have been disabled.

***Had a ten-minute lull in writing this as Virgin Media went off-air yet again. Today was pretty good, only ome short interruption (so far) unlike most other days for the past couple of weeks when, in parts of London, it’s been more off than on. What on earth are they doing or not doing? Do they have to turn off the system to upgrade it? If so, why not tell us?

It’s now owned by John Malone’s Liberty Media, of course, although Richard Branson still takes centre stage in their horrible ads. Branson’s not having a good time at the moment. His space business is tenaciously earthbound, new airline ‘Little Red’ is being closed because old enemy BA has wiped the floor with it and Virgin Trains is charging hapless punters armed with the wrong ticket £1000 to travel from Manchester to London. No wonder he’s left the country.

***And so to bed. We remarked apropos of a&e’s SSE ad and some others that lounge lizard music seems to be the flavour of the year. Here’s Amy Winehouse with Tony Bennett, in one of her last outings.

I still find these clips of Amy quite hard to watch.

One Comment

  1. Re. the SSE ad. I’m not surprised that youtube comments have been disabled. When I first saw it, I thought it was an early outing for a new John Lewis Xmas commercial. It’s like John Lewis’ Snowman meets Cadbury’s Gorilla. And have you noticed that in the latest versions Nat King Cole has been removed from the soundtrack? Hmmmm.

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