To launch the high quality TV channel TNT in Belgium, Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) Europe placed a big red push button on an average Flemish square in an average Flemish town. A sign with the text “Push to add drama” invited people to use the button. And then they waited…
Press the Full screen button to see it at its best.
I’m not a fan of advertising at the best of times. Even ads I like don’t normally influence me. If I need to buy something I go looking for it; I don’t respond to advertising.
Some ads, particularly on TV, leave me shaking my head in amazement – first, that some agency even had the idea, and second, that the client thought it was a good one.
This ad, currently on TV in Australia, is one of those. What were they thinking?
Auctions can be interesting, entertaining, or scary—and even all three. Sometimes they have an unexpected twist at the end.
Take a creative advertising agency, a great idea, and a Finnish client with a sense of fun. Put them together and you get this…
A Chinese Ming vase is up for auction. The bidding opens at half a million Euros (more than $AUD600,000). Bids come quickly—each one raises the total by €100,000— and within seconds reaches one million. The excitement in the room is palpable, and there’s a collective gasp from the crowd. The auctioneer knocks down the vase: “One million for the first, second and third time. Sold…”
You’ll have to watch the video to see what happens next!
I love it when someone demonstrates a sense of the absurd.
Several years ago Melbourne radio station Nova FM ran a TV ad for the Hughesy Kate and Dave breakfast show. It featured Dave Hughes in a wheelie bin being trundled into the path of an oncoming tram. Hughesy’s reaction when he realised where he was? What else would anyone do but yell at the tram driver, “Go round… go round!”
The absurdity of a tram leaving its rails to navigate around an errant wheelie bin made me crack up, no matter how many times I saw the ad… and it still has the same effect, years later. It’s the first in this series of four starring the breakfast trio (Dave Hughes, Kate Langbroek and Dave O’Neil):
Postscript: Around the time the ad was showing, I was filling my car’s fuel tank at one of our local service stations. Two four-wheel drive vehicles covered in mud pulled in to refuel, and several early-twenties guys emerged. Now, as someone who cares about the bush I’m not all that impressed with “Toorak tractors” [1] or their drivers at the best of times, and even less impressed when city-dwellers take to the bush. The amount of mud on these vehicles, and the fact that it almost completely covered them, seemed to shout that they’d been driven fast and hard on bush tracks – a practice that cuts up the tracks and spoils the bush experience for those who follow. But I had to laugh when one of the vehicles obstructed the other’s path, and one of its occupants yelled to the other driver, “Go round… go round!”
[1] Toorak tractors: a disparaging reference to expensive 4x4s that are driven in an urban environment as a status symbol, typically for the school run, and rarely or never leave suburbia; Toorak is one of Melbourne’s wealthiest and most expensive suburbs.