This is a new BMW commercial. Is it just me, or do the combination of Donald Sutherland’s mellifluous Canadian tones, and an idea that reinterprets the negative as positive (Thankyou hills, thankyou traffic jams) conspire to remind one of another car brand?
‘Can hills be good?’
We don’t usually stoop to slagging other folks’ ads here. But in this case, we’ll make an exception.
Planning guru Kevin Chesters writes, from the very top of his vertiginously high horse:
I realise that there
is something of a fad for, "Hey Joe Public, write an advert and we’ll
give you tuppence/a free burger/a holdall full of shiny hooded tops"
and I’m all for the growth of (good) User Generated Content but,
goodness me.
Saw this (above) this morning in the "Metro".
1. "write a great
travel headline": I’d suggest that possibly filching a bad pun used
every week on Soccer AM for the last five years might not qualify as
"great".
2. "£50"??? Compare this to the cost of any agency/copywriter/designer/street sweeper and this looks tighter than tight.
3. What do you think Smee’s (or whoever is responsible for Expedia) think of this?
4. shame on whoever came up with this excuse for a ‘strategy’.
This ‘Moscow’
execution reminds me of the time I tripped into my creative director’s
office aged 22 in a fit of youthful exuberance and told him I had
written a great ad and his withering response was, "That is not a great
ad. It is a shit pun".
I suspect that about
fifty thousand people would respond to me with comments about simply
being defensive about our great art but for crying out loud. This is
terrible isn’t it? Can anyone argue cogently with me that it isn’t?
Everybody thinks they can write good adverts but this execution (and a
thousand and one suggestions for headlines prefixed with the
phrase "I’m not creative but…") just goes to prove they can’t.
And what on earth has
this got to do with "Let yourself go"? Might as well write "Herds of
Dairylea Goodness" in the corner for all that the execution has to do
with the strategy or strapline.
Man alive….
Please send all outraged defences / responses / abuse directly to Kevin.