Being Beta

Exercises in the higher banter with One of 26. Elsewhere called 'poet of adland'. By a whipple-squeezer. Find out why being beta is the new alpha: betarish at googlemail dot com

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Commercial: Live action drawbacks



I'm loath to disagree with the wildly accurate judgements of Nick. But I'm not sure that Honda's live action experiment tonight was a resounding success. Three reasons:

1. Placement - yes, it's an iconic ad from a great company. But would you expect to see its most daring work in 'Come Dine With Me'? Really?

2. Clarity - my partner, who was watching with me, got to about halfway through and said, 'What's it for?'. She had blinked and missed the 'O'. The end frame resolved things, but she was only staying because of the pre-publicity which leads to:

3. The context of 'live' - the ad only worked *because* of the pre pub. If you happened to turn on C4 tonight, and not known about the ad, you'd have been discombobulated. When you see content tagged as 'live' on TV you generally expect some sort of verbal commentary to guide you through. Not having that pre-supposed that everyone watching knew what was going on, which I'm not sure everyone will have.

Still, good work. Now, who's really going to exploit the idea?

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1 Comments:

Blogger Holly said...

I agree. I knew what was going on, and so did everyone in the ad world, but I'm pretty sure the normal people watching it would have been thoroughly confused about why they were suddenly watching live skydiving. I bet more than one thought they'd sat on the remote and changed the channel.

It's a beautiful idea and I really enjoyed it, but I think a bit of handholding for the general public would have been wise.

9:46 am  

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