To win the Grand Prix at Cannes is just about the ultimate accolade for any commercial – and this year’s joint winners make an odd couple, for neither of them won by being
traditional television commercials.
The Cadbury’s Gorilla spot – where a close up of a gorilla’s face, twitching in anticipation, slowly reveals the animal sitting at a drum set waiting to play the percussion bit in the old Phil Collins hit ‘In the Air Tonight' – started out as a conventional campaign on TV, cinema, print and so on, but it really found legs on the internet. Cadbury’s agency, Fallon Worldwide, certainly seeded the video as part of the media plan, but even they were surprised by 500,000 views on YouTube alone.
What Fallon did right was to convince Cadbury’s to produce entertainment, rather than an advertisement. The connection to the Cadbury’s Dairy Milk line, ‘A glass and a half full of joy’ is tenuous at best, and yet there is clear recall of brand and research has proved both a positive increase in public perception and a 20% rise in sales of Dairy Milk.
Advertising successfully masquerading as entertainment; that’s the ticket. And people from Muscat to Macchu Picchu will pass on your message for you. That means 70 fan groups on Facebook, some of them with 200 plus members professing, “We love the Cadbury’s drumming gorilla.” And this was supposed to be a campaign limited to the UK.
If you haven’t seen the spot, please visit YouTube. And it’s a pity that the Wonderbra spoof video, with busty model/musician Jentina playing the drummer to the line ‘Two cups full of joy’ seems to have been withdrawn.
The other winner, a campaign of four spots for the video game Halo 3 on Xbox, is a different animal altogether. Unlike the 90-sec Gorilla spot, this series of films was created for viewing on the Halo 3 website – so time is not an issue. Entitled ‘Believe’ the documentary style films visit weapons museums and gravesites in the distant future, where UNSC marines fought alien invaders.
Yet the films are different, the retired and elderly survivors of the battle (including Marine Spartan Niraj Shah – have you noticed the discreet acknowledgment of Indian consumers in Western advertising lately ? ) are very credible and what little product sell there is comes through in their reminiscences of the weapons and tactics of the time.
Again the films (no doubt easily downloadable from the website) were picked up and spread to dozens of video hosting sites by gaming enthusiasts (and maybe the odd McCann –paid seeding agent) and the films reached a huge worldwide audience. The marketing campaign won many, many awards and sold many, many games – with a worldwide midnight launch it was the Harry Potter of the gaming industry.
Two Grand Prix winners who made it on the net. One more or less by accident, one very specifically by design. And here’s a paradox – the Cadbury’s Gorilla spot was also screened in cinema theatres, which demands high resolution, is simplicity itself. Basic lighting, a fixed block camera which slowly pulls back to reveal the action -- practically a one-shot film.
The ‘Believe’ videos, designed for viewing on a computer or cell phone screen (which allows one to disguise shoddy production values) are fantastically elaborate, cunningly lit, no-expense-spared Hollywood style productions.
The Gorilla spot was loved and spread around the world by an undifferentiated audience, ordinary people of all ages, many of whom don’t even eat chocolate. They just enjoyed the film. The Halo 3 campaign was almost exclusively viewed by the gaming community – a targeted set of people who passed the ‘Believe’ message to each other, across borders.
And if there’s a message or two here for Indian advertisers and marketers, it’s entertainment, not advertisement; and look beyond the idiot box.
