It's not quite as catchy as its predecessor, but it does have anthropomorphic sperm.
But is it too cute for its own good? Maybe. I recall my only Swedish friend, Åsk Wappling from Adland, hated the first video's made-up names for genitals. And I think she has a point. The sex education curriculum where I live — in Ontario, Canada — is presently being updated to include teaching kids in Grade One the appropriate names for their genitals. You'd think that sexually-progressive Swedes would demand no less than real biology.
Now THIS is how you deploy the "ad designed to be banned" strategy.
Via Australia, of course:
What's not to love? The ad celebrates safer sex, it uses sexuality to sell in a playful way, and it isn't sleazy.
Australia's FreeTV "Commercials Advice" department (CAD) refused the ad for commercial broadcast. “CAD knocked it back asking for the removal of all sexual references,” Four Seasons founder and managing director Graham Porter told AdNews. “To connect with the younger demographic, you need to be irreverent and entertaining and to remove all sexual references in the TV ad defeats the purpose of this entire campaign. The fact is this is a critical safe sex message.”
The ads will run, however, in Australia's Hoyts cinema chain's theatres before screenings of Jackass: Bad Grandpa — aimed at a 16- to 24-year-old audience.
The ad was written and directed by comedian Gary Eck, known internationally as screenwriter for the children's movie Happy Feet Two.
I'm not much of an Oscars fan, so instead I spent last night catching up with The Walking Dead. If you did too (or if you recorded it for later), and you are a Canadian Rogers Cable customer, you will have noticed the frequent distraction of a text crawl in which the cable company apparently threatens to drop AMC from its cable package.
The text crawl and Facebook ads (above) target fans of AMC's best series, such as The Walking Dead, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad. They lead to a web site called keepamccanada.com that asks viewers to fill in a form to let Rogers know they don't want to lose the service.
Every once in a while, cable networks renegotiate contracts with the providers. When the negotiations do not go thier way, they try to rile up the customers as leverage to get more out of the cable company. if the cable company pays more than is comfortable, the price of our service goes up. To be fair to everyone, we should also write AMC that they would be losing customers as well if they try to drive our prices up. I believe that a solid performer like AMC deserves more money for the quality original programming they produce, but not if it will hit the customers pocketbook. So, Rogers is not dropping the channel, it is more likely that they refused the first demand put on the table.
In other words, it's AMC's tactic to get Rogers subscribers to get up-in-arms to keep the network no matter how much it costs. And it worked:
All over social media, Rogers subscribers are threatening to drop the service if it loses AMC. Considering that these shows are eventually available on Netflix and various (and often unofficial) online channels, this is a very dangerous place for Rogers to be. But although they have broadcast their case, Rogers social media managers seem to be failing to respond one-on-one to these customer concerns, which is somewhat of a fail.
Network Vs. Carrier, with customer anxiety used as a weapon. This won't reflect well on either side, in the end.
Why don't we have a show this cool in North America?
Australia's The Gruen Transfer has a segment called "The Pitch" in which it asks viewers to suggest objectives for "impossible" creative briefs via social media, which real admen and adwomen then have to pitch spec creative on.
This episode, in which Australians were asked to support a ban on vulgar language, was pretty fucking hilarious. (Wear headphones if you don't work in an unashamedly vulgar ad agency office.)
You can just leave the playlist going to see other briefs. I just love how this show not only entertains, but educates viewers on how ads are conceived, and how different two good solutions to one problem can be.
When you have kids, it can be a little scary just how influential TV commercials can be to their growing minds. My five-year-old son, who loves the Discovery Channel, has suddenly started hounding his mother and me to buy everything — EVERYTHING — he sees advertised.
"You should get a Highlander. It's really powerful." "Mom? You should buy this shampoo. It smells really good!" "Dad, you would like to play poker. It's a man game."
And, despite every locavorous, artisinal, foodie meal we make him he sees one spot with beauty shots of kids piling into hotdogs with Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love Is" booming in the background, and:
"My favourite hotdogs are Maple Leaf."
Sigh. But I'm not going to take TV away from him. In my opinion, mass media are part of our modern consumer environment. Rather than censoring, I prefer to watch with him, do my best to counteract the pitches, and use my insider knowledge to give him age-appropriate media awareness education.
But despite the short-term brainwashing, I also wonder if the long-term effects of this exposure will really be all that negative. I turned 40 today, so I guess I'm in kind of a nostalgic mood, but I also consider my Gen-X childhood spent in front of the electronic babysitter part of what made me what I am today.
For example, much of our PSA work here at Acart, as well as the campaigns I cover on this blog and at Osocio, has to do with road safety. And what was an early influence?
Seems negative, but we actually based a two-year Transport Canada safety campaign on toys called "Safety is No Game". Look familiar?
This next commercial is just a reminder of how far we have come in child safety. Check out these kids doing bootlegger turns, helmet free, on these awesome death cycles. My friend Keith had one of these. I think I still have a piece of gravel in my elbow from a wipeout when I tried to emulate the stunt kids:
The biggest influences on us as kids, though, were the consumer jingles and slogans that we sang in the schoolyard every day. Remember any of these?
Sometimes, it was jingles for the "adult" products that didn't target us whatsoever that really stuck in our heads:
But it wasn't all consumerism. The '70s was the golden age of PSAs. Many of them seem awkward and clunky today, but if you're of a certain age, Iron Eyes Cody's "crying Indian" pollution spot is iconic:
Who cares if the actor was really Sicilian? There really used to be that much garbage lying around — especially in the U.S. I believe that a whole generation of environmentalists was influenced by the "noble savage" myth of this ad.
And for Canadian kids, another big environmental icon was Hinterland Who's Who:
These ads gave me my lifelong love of nature. It outlasted all the toys, and all the fast food cravings, that I ever had as a kid.
Now my son is the nature freak, feeding off of the endless varieties of documentary available on cable and DVD. So perhaps he'll turn out okay too.
I started this blog a year ago today. I wondered if the April Fool's joke would be on me, but I've managed to keep it up pretty regularly.
For this post, I wanted to look to the past. Not a year ago, but almost 50. It's a clip Casey sent me from TV Squad, with a primetime Jackie Gleason trying to make good for a bad game show he had been involved with.
The show, called "You're in the Picture", was a typical celebrity guessing game where guests would stick their head into an amusing picture, and guess what the scene was based only on hints. It lasted one episode.
The following week, Gleason appeared sans set, smoking and drinking, and addressing the audience with a hilarious apology for what a bad show it had been.
The reason I find this relevant today is that I believe there are parallels between online communications today and TV in the early 1960s. From this perspective, both media are at a point where they had been mainstream for about a decade and a half, had moved from experimentation to standardization of content, and are entering a new phase of adapting to (and even being created by) generations who had grown up with them.
What Jackie Gleason did in 1961 is what creators of digital content need to do today:
• Admit mistakes • Be yourself • Be transparent • Be engaging • Be humble • Be fun
I wish I had been there at the time to watch this funny fat man turn a TV disaster into a fantastic piece of broadcast performance. But thankfully, the Internet never forgets:
