Sir Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital and its lead agency MediaMonks (now just Monks it seems) are never far from adland headlines although recently it’s been mostly about missed targets, cost and people reductions and a plummeting market value – currently £229m about the same as M&C Saatchi. It was once, briefly, a dizzy £4bn.)
But what do the Monks actually do? BMW is supposedly one of its biggest wins and here’s a Monks effort for Mini featuring milliner Stephen Jones. He asks his gadget-rich Mini to take him to London’s posh Cadogan Square (suspect he well knows where it is.)
Is it an ad or an infomercial? More the latter although it doesn’t really matter: our very polite and rather winning “hat engineer” does show us how it works, which is moderately useful. Most car ads these days say look at me I’m an EV – and that’s it.
Will the apparent ability to cruise around a strangely traffic-free Belgravia (average house price £2.75m) drive punters into the showrooms? Arguable at best.
MAA creative scale: 4.5.
