Keeping Continuity Creative

We’ve been thinking a lot recently about ads that ‘work’ and ads that don’t. Partly because me and my mate Chris Forrest were invited to talk about Stephen King’s Masterclass in Brand Planning at the book club hosted by Nick Southgate and those other nice people at Grey London.

The conversation came round to long-running campaigns which have a strong and recognisable theme or hook.

Apparently it takes about two years for associative connections to become forged in our brains. And that once the connection is made, it is hard or impossible to break. So you’d think the aim in marketing communications would be find a set of associations, something distinctive and recognizable and stick to it – update it and refresh it, add to it, by all means, but keep something constant.

Here are two ads trying to ‘move on’. Direct Line is a good example of how not to do it. Cadbury’s Flake does it well – although not everyone agrees.

The VO starts, “small business owners, we know you’re hard to impress…” and the ad is a slow zoom in on some random, expressionless guy. The VO drones on as the hard-to-impress face gets bigger and we end up looking at a Post-It note with a URL scribbled on it in tiny writing.

Actually, that was the original version. They subsequently added the red phone and the panel on RHS of the end frame. The point is, remove that red phone, which immediately brings DL’s shrill jingle to mind, and there is nothing left, at all. Perhaps they were trying to be all ‘business-y’ and thought the phone and its jingle was too childish or too consumer-y. Big mistake. Our mental image of Direct Line is almost certainly red-phone-shaped, these connections being well and truly forged by now.

What mental associations have been forged around Cadbury’s Flake? Perhaps, the woman on her own, the music/theme tune and the spilled crumb bit. The latest version features Joss Stone and has two of those three elements. She is not on her own literally, although she is maybe in her own world during her ‘Flake break’. To my mind it is a successful update, keeping enough continuity with the past but modernizing and making the portrayal of the woman far more credible, far less of an adman’s construct.

We don’t see Joss Stone stepping out into the rain, whereas previous Flake women seemed always to get wet, for some reason (in the field, in the canoe heading helplessly for the waterfall, in the convertible, in the bath).

In the book club, some people preferred the more artful Flake ads of the past, like the one with the overflowing bath and the lizard. Two separate ads, it turns out. This is the bath one:

Our brains play tricks on us. But they do love continuity in their advertising.

Comments

[Shadenfreude]

Cadbury flake is generally a gag (!) about oral sex,but they seem to have left Joss Stone out of the joke this time.