Adweek magazine has named Wieden + Kennedy’s ‘Cats with thumbs’ commercial for Cravendale one of its ‘top ten of 2011’.

Adweek magazine has named our 'Cats with thumbs' commercial for Cravendale one of its 'top ten of 2011'. Here's what they say:

Why do cats stare when you're pouring milk? The answer seems obvious. They're cats. They love milk. But this irresistible spot by Wieden + Kennedy for British dairy Cravendale wondered if the cute little kitties might not have a more nefarious agenda. After a lifetime of waiting on their owner's generosity, perhaps they want to take matters into their own paws. Maybe they're ready to band together and raid your milk supply. They would need just one thing, and this spot humorously gives it to them—opposable thumbs. Suddenly, the polydactyl felines are seen picking up balls, filing their nails, flipping through books, and doing a little needlepoint. But they're just biding their time and honing their sinister plot. Sure enough, soon they're snapping their fingers, West Side Story style, and preparing to gang up on the selfish, cereal-eating human and steal his milk. Cats are always big in ads, but this spot chased off all rivals this year. And we may get a sequel. As one of the spot's feline stars wrote on Twitter this fall: "Know this: you have not heard the last from me."

Chuffed with this news, Bertrum Thumbcat plots the next stage of world domination:

And here is the TV ad again, in all its 8th place glory.

There seems to be a lot of talk in the trade press recently about 'neuromarketing'. And there was an interesting piece 'advertising is a poison' in The Guardian last week. George Monbiot makes some good points in the article. At W+K we don't tend to think of our work as a 'battering ram'  of 'pervasiveness and repetition'; the people behind the likes of Go Compare may well have a different point of view.

But is advertising the cause of a society that celebrates image, power and status, or is it a symptom of this society? People have aspired to these values since they were jealous of the neanderthal with a better cave. The societies where the state has tried to enforce the suppression of these aspirations – hello, Stalin's Russia, North Korea – have in the main been pretty miserable places. It isn't just advertising that makes humans want a bigger house and a new car.

Since the publication of Hidden Persuaders in the 1950s, academics have been suggesting that advertising has the power to manipulate the subconscious. But it's pretty rare that an agency team will have a conversation with clients about neurobiology, or how our message will be processed by the prefrontal cortex of our audience, or how we can conceal some sort of secret mind-control message in an ad. It's just not that scientific or simple. We wouldn't deny that advertising has the power to manipulate the unconscious mind. But pundits overestimate our ability to control or predict how we're doing it.

Meanwhile, it's ironic that Monbiot suggests advertising is to blame for low savings rates by UK families when at the bottom of the article there is an ad for… Barclays Investments.

In Marketing magazine this week, Dr AK Pradeep 'one of the world's leading neuromarketing experts' says, "One of my clients trying to sell milk experimented with various imagery – farms, grass, hay, barns farmers…The one that always wins out is cows. Somehow the source of a product is more evocative in the deep subconscious than anything else. This is something we've learned through neuromarketing."

So, what about cats with thumbs, as featured in our highly successful campaign for Cravendale milk then?

Our view: the difficulty with showing cows or talking about the other familiar benefits  listed above by Dr Pradeep is that it gives the audience immediate permission to ignore you because they assume you're telling them what they already know. But something dissonant and unexpected like a polydactyl cat slaps you across the face (not literally, we don't yet have the technology to make that possible) and makes you pay attention in a way you wouldn't have done otherwise for such a functional product. An 8% sales increase suggests that this approach has merits.

Of course, perhaps if we had done a campaign featuring cows with thumbs, we would have sold even more milk.