It’s quite hard to advertise a product most of your audience thinks is failing, for one reason or another. Take pubs. We all love them (well some of us do, when not bemoaning the lack of wine bars in Soho) but prices have gone through the roof post-pandemic and dear old Brexit and they’re struggling big time. Even the weather’s against them. They’ve become a costly way of socialising.
Undeterred brewer Greene King is selling us just that in a new campaign from TMW Unlimited featuring poet and “spoken word artist” Lotte Rice.
Somehow it works – could it be because it has a person fronting it and people in it? Most ads these days are just quick-cut montages of barely-related film. Seemingly they play better with the befuddled, bored hamsters in focus groups.
MAA creative scale: 7.
Trains are another factor in modern British life (and German it seems, judging by reports from the Euros) that struggle to inspire affection. In their case because they often don’t work and, like pubs, cost a fortune.
So recently we’ve been seeing a number of would-be cutesy animated creatures trying to convince us that travelling by train isn’t the dismal experience it often can be. Here’s South Western Railway from St Luke’s with another one (actually two.)
The Luton Airport Express is hardly up there with bullet trains (gets you there “in as little as 32 minutes” which sounds like a weasel) but this ad featuring actress Katie Sheridan is getting a lot of airtime on digital channels (too often for some but that’s another story.). And, chiefly thanks to Ms Sheridan, who’s clearly a talented trouper, it works. She, of course, is a person too.
Let’s not labour the point but the best ads often have people in them. Greene King and Luton are hardly up there with John Smith’s, Cinzano and Parker (still to be found on YouTube) but they do engage.
MAA creative scale: South Western Railway 5, Luton Airport Express 7.
OK then, Here’s John Smith’s (bit creaky but you get the idea.)
