In the Dos Equis campaign in America we are introduced to the Most Interesting Man in the world.
This suave, middle-aged guy is always dressed in a dinner jacket, and he sports silver hair and a goatee beard. As one blogger put it, he appears to be the love child of James Bond and Hugh Hefner.
Although who plays the postman in that relationship would be a head-scratcher.
But the scripts are lovely.
Our hero, we are told, “once had an awkward moment, just to see how it feels”.
We are also informed that “he lives vicariously – through himself.”
Jesus, I love that.
He ends each film by advising us all to “stay thirsty”. (Which reminds me of an early HHCL endline for Pot Noodle – “stay hungry”. But that’s the curse of sticking around in this industry.)
A similarly ironic take on masculinity can be found in the campaign for Ole, a sportspaper in Buenos Aires. The campaign tells us about “the man with Ole under his arm”.
Initially I misread this as a rather unattractive sexual perversion, but in fact it’s a brilliantly simple visual idea, which gets coupled with surreal bits of copy.
Like “don’t discriminate against a sneezing pig”.
Try as you might, you can’t argue with that.
And there’s a couple of suggestions for unattractive positions to lie in, for men to take up when they feel like they’ve had enough sex.
(Which reminds me of an HHCL campaign for Molson Ex, but that’s what … etc.)
There’s some great comedy in the entries for the the Integrated section of D&AD. Clearly not all the comedy geniuses in advertising got fired in the last round of the Great Depression.
The campaign to help the Japanese town of Yubari clear debts of $353million created a cartoon character using the word “Fusai”, a word which in its original language means both “spouse” and “debt”.
That makes me laugh.
Although their endline for the campaign – “no money but love” – touches another part of my brain.
ESPN created a heavy metal band going under the brilliant name of “the Group of Death”. Which allowed them to talk to viewers about the World Cup 7 months before launch. It’s all a bit too Spinal Tap, but I did like the lyric “Your love is a like a boot to the face”.
Still on comedy, another brilliant US campaign, for Shredded Wheat, celebrates their unchanging recipe by declaring that progress is over-rated, and claiming that their company “put the no in innovation”. My favourite character in the campaign puts on a white coat and says he may not be a real doctor and you should speak to a real doctor before starting a new diet but you should also “talk to a real lawyer before suing me for impersonating a doctor”.
Still in the States, still on comedy, a campaign for Office Depot has shifted from the print medium to short films online. As the awards VO explains, this has the “added advantage” of meaning that their new campaign is “not boring”.
At one point the two presenters attempt to microwave some money to demonstrate the financial irresponsibility of not joining Office Depot’s Loyalty scheme. One of them points out the inadequacy of their demonstration by remarking that if people don’t join they are actually “burning money, not warming money up”.
All this stuff makes me laugh out loud.
Maybe I’m easy to please or maybe I’ve been overdoing it with the meow mix.
Of course, humour isn’t the only answer – nor the only quality in the D&AD entries which I liked. There’s the shock of the new and making the world a better place, topics I’ll get onto at some point in the future if I can be arsed.
But it strikes me that the skills needed to write brave, self-mocking, comedy are massively important. We used to do that rather well in Britain.
Mother of course has always done it to spectacular effect, and hopefully always will.
Someone told me recently that Mother is re-branding itself. It wants to be known not as an advertising agency, but as an entertainment agency.
He might have been having a laugh.
But it made an awful lot of sense to me.
