And A Glass and a Half Productions is BACK with their 90 sec trailers aired again on September 5th 2008! Pure Brilliance!
Check out the website too!
http://www.aglassandahalffullproductions.com/
The concerns of a nervous client are all absolutely valid. There is no reason for a gorilla to play the drums. The ad tells you nothing about Dairy Milk. Yet, ultimately, it doesn't matter. "Gorilla" is one of those once-in-a-blue-moon pieces that, despite all rational evidence to the contrary, is set to return the tracking results that most planners could only dream of.
By the end of October, value sales of Dairy Milk had already shot up 7 per cent. Weekly sales were up 9 per cent year on year during the period "gorilla" was on air, and the ad has already received the highest recognition scores ever recorded by Hall & Partners.
So much of this ad's success lies in its smart execution. No massive production budget. No multi-location shoot. Instead, some delicate touches from Fallon helped along by some smart placement from Starcom Media and intuitive PR from Sputnik.
Posing as a real film production company, A Glass and a Half Full Productions featured a pre-ad teaser campaign in TV listings that resembled a film. The Glass and a Half Full Productions website ensured a long-term dialogue with fans was sustained. Meanwhile, 90-second slots during the Big Brother Final and Rugby World Cup matches gave the ad authority.
TV showed it could still flex its muscles. The ad captured the nation's imagination and a surge of interest followed. All of which was manna to a company that had been having a pretty dismal time of it.
For until now, Cadbury had been at the centre of a number of media firestorms. In June 2006, a series of salmonella scares had resulted in more than one million bars of chocolate (including Dairy Milk) being removed from shelves.
Last February, its £10 million launch of the US chewing-gum Trident had been mired in controversy after an ad by JWT featuring an Afro-Caribbean poet was deemed racially offensive and rapped by the Advertising Standards Authority. Then, in June this year, news that Cadbury Schweppes was to announce a £300 million cost-cutting exercise was another tough headline for the company.
Suddenly, barely three months later, and through "gorilla", Cadbury was generating positive headlines again. Cuts from across the nationals, trade press, lads' mags and radio praised and discussed the whys and wherefores of the gorilla and it became a talisman for England's Rugby World Cup campaign with some cultural critics even comparing it to Dadaism - a counter-cultural piece of work going against the form of its period.
So it's not a campaign in the traditional sense. But if one piece of creative work is so spectacular that it can breathe new life into television, creating its own multimedia campaign on the fly, then Fallon and Cadbury deserve even more credit. Advertising has broken through and brought Cadbury back into the national psyche. It's different, it's exciting, it's fun, it worked. Sod the traditionalists. This is what 21st-century advertising should aspire to.
1 comment:
Cadbury gorilla to reprise his role next week
by Staff Marketing 29-Aug-08, 13:14
LONDON - Cadbury is bringing back its drumming gorilla next week, nearly a year on from the original launch.
The gorilla played the drum solo of Phil Collins' track 'In the Air Tonight'. The £6.2m campaign, by Fallon, broke during the live final of last summer's 'Big Brother'.
It was one of the most lauded ads, winning acclaim from the public as well as industry awards.
Next week's reprise will comprise mostly of the same footage and music, but with a slight twist, according to sources.
When the Gorilla ad first appeared, Cadbury said it was a one-off commercial that was to introduce a theme of a ‘moment of joy'.
Cadbury launched the follow-up ad, a midnight truck race to the soundtrack of Queen's ‘Don't Stop Me Now', in March this year.
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