04 Mar

Wonderful one-offs

Just a quick one, but does anyone know what’s happened to traditional campaigns?
You know the ones – at least three different (visually) executions of the same idea, nailed with an endline.

Think Mastercard ‘Priceless’, Carlsberg ‘Probably the best in the world’, Sony ‘Colour like no other’, Cadbury’s ‘A glass and a half full of joy’, The AA ‘The fourth emergency service’.

The first ad would come out for one of these and:
1) You’d almost be waiting for the next one (maybe more so if you give a toss about ads)
2) You’d just know that the creative team must’ve spent days coming up with 30+ executions to the idea and these were the few that made it.

But what seems to be on trend at the moment is simply coming up with a bloody good one-off.
These stand-alone ads seem to generate more attention – going viral – than any lengthy campaign.

Take two examples that were spec originally, created by designers undertaking a One Minute Brief:

Screenshot 2021-03-04 at 15.51.51

 

Screenshot 2021-03-04 at 16.08.21

Both of these beauties went viral and got picked up by the brands themselves, who then ran them.
They are in line with existing advertising for these brands – ‘Have a break’ and ‘Good things come to those who wait’ – but they’re not part of a series. They just exist as they are.

It’s the same with this AA spot:

It’s not attached to any existing campaign (there’s no endline other than a CTA: ‘Join today’), it’s just free floating, but everyone seems to love Tukker the dog.

And then there’s this Weetabix one – still under the banner of ‘she’s/he’s had his/her Weetabix’, but all out on its lonesome:

So, is the traditional campaign dead?
It certainly seems that way.
Creativity is still alive and kicking though – all hail the wonderful one-off.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *