The difficulty of picking the current ‘best campaign’…
Oct 6th, 2009 by Simon
I was asked by Carlos (the Brazilian blogger) to name my favourite campaign. And asked for the opportunity to name 5 – which is a total cop-out, but I wanted to do an “over the ages, by decade” pick. And, as you go back through older ads, it’s relatively easy to pick a corker for each decade.
My four from the past were:
60’s: Union Carbide “Chick”
70’s: Fiat Strada “Handbuilt by robots”
80’s: Apple “1984”
90’s: Blackcurrant Tango “Ray Gardner”
Four decades where TV/Cinema ruled supreme – there were remarkable print/outdoor ads and some great radio, but nothing compared to TV… Then, this decade, it all changes and you’re caught debating the best “campaign” – because it has to be something that is driven across so many more points of communication. There’s epic examples of TV still (Comcast Rabbit, Cadbury Gorilla, Sony Balls to name just 3), but that isn’t enough – they’re ‘just ads’ (not that we should forget the potency that ads have still)… But for “best campaign of this age” it needs to be something that lives beyond that – something that truly exemplifies a campaign with a belief, an organising principle, a thought, whatever you want to call it. But something that goes beyond a message and becomes a point of involvement.
I ended up going back to my first thought – the example I use so often when talking about what we mean by “more than just an ad”…
Haagen-Dazs “Honey Bees“
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http://graemeharrison.typepad.com graeme_harrison
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splaw