• ISCRIVITI ALLA NEWSLETTER

Creative trends as resulting from an analysis of the most awardedcommercials in the world. Seven instigations for seven perfect murders.

On the night of January 26, 1967, at the end of the first round of the Festival of Sanremo, a very popular song contest in Italy, one of the competing artists, Luigi Tenco, shot himself with a pistol because his song had not been selected for the shortlist. We would hope that nobody will ever follow such a distressing example, either in Sanremo or anywhere else.

And especially not in Cannes, where some 4,000 commercials get excluded from the shortlist. If each one of them had been thought up, written and directed by a single person, the suicide of such a high number of individuals would throw the whole planet into a state of consternation.

Among the disquieting pathologies that this strange age is offering us, there is one, very subtle and evasive, to which researchers have paid little attention: the MLS (Missing Lion Syndrome).

Hundreds of art directors, copywriters and creative directors get back home from Cannes with alarming symptoms. Some appear more irritable than usual, others more silent and depressed, while the frequency with which the magic word “fucking” — or its equivalent in twenty other languages — is uttered increases statistically by 25 to 30%. Another typical reaction to Festival-induced stress is a pronounced inclination toward bulimia and alcohol abuse.

The excessive number of Michelin stars scattered in the area encourages consolatory overeating, and barmen from the Martinez know they can expect orders to rocket during the Festival.

Yet capturing Lions in Cannes — though difficult — is far from impossible. Lots of people catch them each year, and how! Given a few basic conditions (talent and skill, to start with), is there an unfailing recipe for a winning commercial? To produce a commercial which is at least worthy of the shortlist, even if it cannot aspire to a bronze, silver or gold award, let alone the most dignified and coveted acknowledgement, the Grand Prix?

Let us clear up a misunderstanding and put things straight. Producing a funny film can help, but it is not enough.

The 1999 Grand Prix, Litany — the sublime black-and-white work of art for the British daily The Independent — could be described in many ways, but not as a comic film. On the contrary, it was a work overflowing with formidable pathos, absolutely moving. That film disproved another commonly held belief, showing that you can win by injecting masses of text into the soundtrack, which goes against the common trend of letting the images speak.

In spite of this, it is true that making people laugh can help. Statistics confirm that a high percentage of Lions (but also of Clio Awards and other statuettes of different shapes, weights and metals) end up being taken home by authors with a good sense of humour.

The question is: how can you produce something that makes people laugh? It is not easy. Woody Allen is like a mother: he is unique. Furthermore, making the members of the jury in Cannes laugh can be a steep challenge. Put yourself in their shoes.

Imagine them closed in a bunker from morning ’til evening, day after day, holding a remote control device in their hands while a TV screen pours a shower of miscellaneous products before them. As fifteen to thirty decent, though frankly boring commercials roll past the jury, blood sugar drops drastically, and signs of catatonia appear.

At that point, a funny commercial arrives to shake them out of their torpor and semi-consciousness. A cathartic burst of laughter and their forefingers — out of gratitude — press a high button on the scoring scale. Mind you, nearly all members of the jury are so frightened by the idea of looking foolishly generous that a five can be considered a good, or even excellent, score. With an average of five, you can easily be at the top end of the list.

So, while humor is welcome, it is not sufficient. You all know those types who annoy with appalling “funny” stories and no hope whatsoever of making you laugh. Drawing a smile from your neighbor is a very complicated art. It calls for superhuman skill and methodology. Yes, methodology.

Furthermore, the recipe for humor is not always the same over time. What put our naive ancestors in a good mood or amused us in our high chairs may now make us whisper in a scornful voice, “So what?”

Once 1 went to Chicago as a member of the jury of the Clio Awards. It was seven days of hard labor, including Easter Sunday. At the very last moment, my colleagues and I were asked to select from a group of vintage commercials, all lauded with medals, honor and glory, the ones whose spirit had triumphed over time. The purpose of this exercise was to place the happy few in the heaven of immortal commercials, the Clio Hall of Fame. What a grievous experience.

It was like suddenly meeting your old schoolmates after decades and findir* they had become old and weak, flabby and lame. The commercials that proved able to resist the test of their “big chill” could be counted on your fingertips. Ads are likefish: over time, they go off.

If we want to make a list of instructions explaining how to win in Cannes, Chicago or elsewhere, we do not need to understand the mechanisms necessary to make Ideal Advertising, but those needed for Contemporary Ideal Advertising.

Advertising ain’t what it used to be. 

Creating great ads is no easy game. Creating great contemporary and innovative ads is even harder.

Over the past forty years the world has changed, and good advertising has changed with it. This seems obvious, but most of the ads we see (and sometimes we make) today are more related to the past than to the present.

There is no exact formula for outstanding, contemporary creative quality. It is a special alchemy of personal talent and attitude, professional skills, a 360° curiosity, passion and cultural modernity. It is also a subtle balance between discipline and anarchy. An analysis of many recent award-winning commercials helps us better understand how to survive festivals, prevent depression and maybe even earn a prize.

Innovation has something to do with provocation. It is breaking rules. What rules should be broken, why, and how, is the subject of this study.

Breaking rules is the most distinctive and easily recognisable sign of Contemporary Ideal Advertising. The rules in question are seven in number: to kill so many of them, you must put on your gloves and display the will and mindfulness of a grave and meticulous serial killer.

Seven instigations for a perfect crime.

Take a pen and a piece of paper, sit comfortably at the Martinez bar, on a desk-chair at the Carlton, on the terrace of the Majestic or in the hall of the Noga Hilton. Switch your mobile off, order a Cuba Libre and write:

Kill the product;

Kill good feelings;

Kill impatience;

Kill your favorite music;

Kill advertising;

Kill the consumer;

Kill superficiality.

As you can see, our workload is heavy, and even though it looks brutal at first, it doesn’t include killing either clients or account executives. Their active co-operation in the project is fundamental. Try to win their favor and their complicity. You will not regret it, and neither will they.

Instigation No. 1: Kill the product.

Marketing people in the year 2001 wear different clothes from the ones back in 1966. They drive cars equipped with airbags and satellite navigators, use mobiles and computers, travel more, attend gyms, skip lunches to keep in shape. But apart from these details, they often, if not always, reason in exactly the same way as their colleagues of thirty-five years ago. For instance, they are still convinced that their product is the most important thing in the world for millions of human beings. As a result, they expect their product to be treated as a hero in the ad. What is a hero’s mission? To save the world, of course. Both in fiction and in advertising, the whole story, from beginning to end, revolves around the hero. It is the hero who creates situations and solves mankind’s problems by imposing his strength and enlightening presence; nothing and nobody can cast a shadow on him. The fact is that Contemporary Ideal Advertising and the juries of the Festival of Cannes do not give a damn about all this. As Tina Turner sang in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome: “We don’t need another hero”.

So, my dear readers, if you want to be on the shortlist, your starting point must be: “Stop treating products as heroes”. Treating products as heroes is a practice as old as the hills. The product no longer has that same old magic. One of the most visible shiftsin contemporary and trendy advertising concerns the role played by the product. Of course, it is still the final key of the message, but it no longer has the narrative priority it had before. It has progressively come down off its pedestal. It needs more support, it cannot easily make it alone anymore.

Why?

It is the fault of welfare. Buying a Coke every day is less exciting than buying it once a year. When the fridge is full, the intensity of desire decreases. Only a few decades ago, most families didn’t even know what a fridge, full or empty, was. In today’s affluent countries, objects of desire are much more affordable than in the past (except Ferraris, Cartiers and a few other items). They are still needed, of course, but their “charisma” is often faded. Products still do work miracles, but only in very poor countries. Introducing toothpaste to Zimbabweans is like bringing health, hygiene and survival to a place where life conditions are tremendously precarious. In Western markets, products do not work miracles anymore. They are not gods. They are just goods. Today, sanctifying them in an ad sounds ridiculously old-fashioned.

That’s why the advertising focus has moved from His Majesty the Product to the so-called “consumer”. With the help of market and motivational research, we learned to explore every intimate corner of the consumer’s soul: feelings, expectations,fears, behavior, reactions. And so the hero of advertising which, in the beginning, was a fizzy drink, a soap or a car, is now a character with a head, arms and legs: a man, or a woman, who drinks, washes or drives.

“Kill the product” doesn’t mean that you must blow up the car of your next campaign with TNT, or make it sink into quicksand as Norman Bates did in Psycho (a beautiful and passionate sequence, by the way). It simply means that you must kill the potential hero hiding in the product. Avoid singing its praises as you would do with a master or a messiah. Keep clear of exaltation, emphasis, overstatement. The product must play its natural role and no more. Do you remember last year’s Grand Prix? What did the beer do? The beer was a beer, that’s all. “Whassup?”, someone asked a few friends. And the friends replied: “Watching TV, drinking a beer”. That’s all: drinking a beer. Drinking a beer is

a pleasant experience. Isn’t that enough? Why should a beer also give you happiness or immortality by solving your existential problems once and for all? Especially avoid adding a voice — a voice-over would be even worse — pouring out a list of qualities and performances. If someone has obliged you — aiming a pistol at your head — to commit this old crime, please avoid entering the competition with your worthless ad. It will prevent disappointment and be an act of kindness toward your health.

Instigation No. 2: Kill good feelings (be bad).

A touch of the negative has always existed in first-class, humorous advertising. One of the absolute legends in the history of advertising has been the series for Hamlet Cigars, clearly based on manhood’s misfortunes and discomforts.

We cannot deny that creative people are a little cynical, skeptical and satanic. They usually prefer humor, malice and drama to a positive feeling and display of happiness. The effect of this touch of evil increases powerfully among festival jury members; as already mentioned, it awakens them from prolonged screening narcosis. What is more interesting is that today’s audience — especially the young — appreciates the charm of evil.

Humor is the clever son of malice and spite. But even malice has grown up and is not what it used to be. In the past, advertising gags were often surrealistic, with an exaggerated sense of farce and the grotesque — such as in Laurel and Hardy movies.

Today’s humor is less childish and more sophisticated. Being bad today is being bad for real. We need to better investigate the “malicious insights” of human beings in order to render the dark side of individuals with the same passionate realism we sometimes use to portray their good feelings.

A perfect example of malicious insight was awarded the Grand Prix in Cannes a few years ago. The protagonist, a little boy nobody would like to have as his own son, makes fun of a small elephant. He pretends to offer him a Bolo Nestle, but then snatches it away and eats it himself, humiliating the poor animal with maniacal, guttural laughter and sneering. Many years later the little boy — who is now an adult with the same bad character — bumps into that same elephant at a parade and is punished with a solemn slap of the trunk onhis face. Tag line: Think twice about what you do with your last Rob. The enthusiasm of both the public and the juries is surely due in part to the psychological keenness used to build the character — a combination of arrogance, selfishness and wickedness that comes very close to reality. Who can say he has never met a person like this in his life among his schoolmates or neighbors?

But “be bad” has gone well beyond this outstanding example. In the commercial for the launch of www.aucland.com, a French auction site, a whole building is burning. People surrounded by flames are ready to jump out of the window to land on the safety net, but the firemen have cynically decided to take advantage of the situation and offer their net to the highest bidder. As if this were not enough, at the very last moment, just for a few francs more, they abandon the old lady who had won their support, allowing her to plummet to the street. Everything is for sale. It’s just a matter of price.

Very bad also is the nice man featured by www.outpost.com, another e-commerce Web site. To make sure that TV viewers will never forget the name of the site, cannon shots hit a big logo. Instead of ordinary cannon balls, live mice are used, thus arousing the horrified admiration of TV viewers.

In another commercial, Billiards (Fox Sports), which has been awarded several prizes, a billiards player uses his cue in an absolutely unexpected way. Instead of hitting balls, he hits his opponents. Thesis: Billiards would be better if it were hockey. And in Racing Marion, promoting the cross-training programme by Nike, first an arm and then a leg of the main hero — who is following the champion Marion Jones — are cut off with a power saw. The commercial spares young TV viewers this blood-curdling scene. It ends with the image of the flying saw and invites adults to discover five different conclusions on the Internet.

These are all recent and very famous ads whose success is due to their exhilarating wickedness. And there are many more. All of you can search your memories for dozens of these wonderful “bad examples”. Humor softens moral or immoral lessons, and is the best passe-partout to make all human vices acceptable.

Instigation No. 3: Kill impatience (Hitchcockise your treatments).

The need for simple ideas does not imply that we should be simple in their treatment. A certain amount of mystery and unpredictability is essential to contemporary fiction — and advertising. The best contemporary advertising is miniaturized and somewhat thrilling entertainment. Especially when addressed to young targets, contemporary advertising works like a two-way game and stimulates the audience’s mental interaction.

Yesterday’s ads used to tell a story in a straightforward way. Today, the best of them shock you with one or more detours.

There is no story without travel, and there is no travel without suspense. All plots are based on movement (often physical traveling) from point “A” to point “B”. Somewhere, this journey is disturbed by one or more accidents — for instance, meeting the wolf in fairy tales — or is temporarily broken by a detour. The quality of these accidents and digressions, with their skill in creating a surprise, is what makes the story interesting.

The “Hitchcockian digression” is often the foundation for a good modern and creative execution. Even though a commercial lasts no more than a few seconds, contemporary taste requires a little reticence and digression before the final disclosure. You must appeal to the TV viewer and put him on the wrong track before bringing him to the climax. Blind, the famous Levi’s commercial where a mysterious young woman tries to get away from her pursuers by changing her clothes in the toilet of a petrol station, is a happy example of Hitchcockisation. First of all, this is a “reticent” tale, full of coups de theatre. Why is the young woman fleeing and who are her pursuers? What we discover is that she has a bag full of — probably stolen — bank notes. We will never discover more details and, on the other hand, we do not care. First shock effect: the young woman bursts into the gents’ toilet. Second a man is sitting inside, apparently blind. Third: the young woman takes her blond wig and skirt off and puts a pair of jeans on to hide her identity from her enemies. Fourth: even though she is in a hurry, she takes her time to erotically provoke the handsome blind man by buttoning her jeans up just a few inches from his face, partly to make sure he is really blind (The original button fly. Seen in all the wrong places). Fifth: the blind man is not blind. He is the escort of the truly blind man who was in the toilet.

Blind is a thriller, but the technique based on diversion and the escalation of coups de theatre can be applied with good results to other stories. Let’s take St. George, for instance, the extraordinary tour de force for the product Blackcurrant Tango — characterised by great directional virtuosity. A manager of the British company manufacturing Tango receives a letter full of criticism from a French customer, Monsieur Sebastian. The manager flies into a rage. He goes out of his office shouting, followed by a mob of assistants and threateningly heads for Dover’s white cliffs to challenge the troublemaker to a duel. The march takes on the epic tone of a final fight between two long-standing enemies who face each other from both sides of the Channel. In this case, too, there is physical movement, from “A” to “B”. But during the march — where apparently there are no cuts — surprises multiply in a crescendo: the manager gets rid of his clothes; finally, he wears only a pair of boxer shorts; he is followed by hundreds of supporters who hoist their flags; they all get to the cliffs where a ring has already been mounted; the sky is flooded by a multitude of helicopters…a war has erupted.

A historic ad for the daily newspaper The Guardian, worked out in 1986 by John Webster from Boase Massimi Pollit and directed by Paul Weiland, not only surprises us with two highly dramatic coups de theatre, but also explains their objective: the unexpected, the digression and the detour are exactly the themes the campaign is dealing with. A skinhead walking on pavement suddenly sprints. The TV viewer — who already feels troubled — asks himself, “Who is this man? Where is he going?” First disclosure: the skinhead is heading for a middle-aged gentleman. We expect something terrible to happen: will he attack him? Final surprise: the skinhead saves the man from falling scaffolding. Now the thesis is clear: The Guardian provides objective information, contrary to papers that tell events from points of view that do not let the reader gain a complete picture of the situation.

Instigation No. 4: Kill your favorite music (Kubrickise your soundtracks).

A common weak point of creative teams is their determination to choose only a soundtrack they like for their commercials. They seldom have the courage to use music they hate or that leaves them cold, even when such a choice could decidedly improve the final effect of their work.

It is highly unlikely for a fan of the Thievery Corporation to use a Strauss waltz in his latest commercial. Conversely, it is highly predictable, when you switch the television on, to bump into two or three ads supported by hits taken from the latest CD by Moby. Yet the soundtrack of a commercial – like that of a feature film – has little to do with personal music tastes. Music – exactly like voices and sound effects – is a component of the sound design and, before that, of communication. Therefore, the soundtrack must not be chosen for its intrinsic qualities, but as part of the effect you want to create. In this connection, I was struck by the absolutely counter-trendy musical choice for Meatball, the Nike commercial where a boy squeezes a steak in order to pour blood on a soccer ball and challenge all the dogs of the neighborhood to run after him. The music underlying the action is a very silly Tyrol’s yodel which is definitely not in line with the musical tastes of the average art director. But in that context, with all that blood and all that Bronx, it mitigates the horrible impact of the scene by playing it down and adding a touch of outlandish irony to it.

In a word, the audio should be as surprising as the video. Nothing has changed more than audio treatment, and especially the use of music, in contemporary advertising. Product jingles are definitely dead. And really great music, when it is too descriptive and correct, is no longer enough to be distinctive. We should learn from Stanley Kubrick.

He has often broken film music rules, by creating audacious contrasts between what we see and what we listen to. Modern interaction between video and audio can be interestingly problematic — just not nicely fitting.

When Kubrick makes planets and starships waltz to the music by Johann Strauss in his 2001: A Space Odyssey, he gives music the role of an ironic comment to the scenes. He seems to tell us: “Wherever human progress may lead us, it will be the same old story. An endless replica of what we are, and still no answers to mankind’s timeless dilemmas”.

Even more paradoxical is the use of music in Doctor Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange. There you have a love ballad under the bomb explosion, and a potpourri of Beethoven’s fragments, Rossini’s arias, and pop tunes from Broadway musicals to underline the absurdity of metropolitan violence.

A commercial for Lufthansa by the Hamburg-based agency Springer & Jacoby, winner of a Silver Lion in Cannes in 1999, provides an outstanding example of the emotional potential that a soundtrack can have. The film consists of two perfectly symmetric parts. All that we can see in the first part is repeated in the second. The only difference is in what we hear. A European businessman has just arrived in New York and takes a taxi from the airport to Manhattan. It is a seemingly linear journey (from “A” to “B”), where the detour entirely depends on the sound design. In the first part – characterised by a troubling mix of wild sirens, threatening, clattering and clashing sounds in the free jazz style – the city is, apparently, hell on a bad day. In the second – though the images are exactly the same – New York looks peaceful, fascinating and rich in vital stimuli. The miracle is worked by the Canone by Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706). The moral of the story: You see the world the way you fly.

Instigation No. 5: Kill advertising.

You have now committed the first four crimes in your career as Lion hunters. You are doing well. But there are still three important stages between you and your prey. So far, you have gotten rid of a rhino (the product) and three antelopes (good feelings, impatience and the music of your favorite group) which were standing between your jeep and the Lions on the horizon. Now you have to perform the three weightiest crimes. Be careful: at this point, the savannah gets more insidious and the preordained victims are up to more tricks than the monkeys. If you don’t have a very clear project in mind, your prey will become hunters and eat you alive.

The strongest enemy of advertising innovation is advertising itself. The best contemporary advertising, that which lets you bring awards home, must not look like advertising. It must not refer to the classic stylistic elements that have characterized advertising for over forty years, elements we have been nourished by for a long time, which are an integral part of our mental database, of our operating system. If we lose control over our own advertising memory — personal experience, all the ads we love — all that jazz will fade into formulas, routine and cliches.

Experience is a double-edged ingredient. We should use 50% of it, and throw away the rest. Because the same good idea never comes twice. When the source ofinspiration is something already done, we’ll just be creating a clone, a B.-thing, yesterday’s stuff.

So, if you want to win awards, you should forget you are an adman, or an adwoman. Take a look beyond the agency’s door. Become a professional voyeur. Beyond the agency’s door you can find many more ideas to inspire you, and more effective ones, than in advertising itself.

Life, first of all. Real life. Do human beings really depend on products as much as they often do in average commercials? Is not spying on the guy or girl next door more helpful than interviewing them for an hour about their favorite ketchup?

Bud’s Whassup won the Grand Prix for being a perfect imitation of life.

Other sources of inspiration? Art, economy, science, theatre, books, travel, whatever. Advertising is a sponge, and in the near future it will be more absorbent than ever.

Literature is still one of the least explored sources, and it is a potential goldmine. How many commercials related to literature can you mention, besides Ridley Scott’s 1984 for the launch of Apple Macintosh? The only other “literary commercial” I personally remember is Levi’s jeans’ Swimmer, inspired by a famous John Cheever short story. In Cheever’s short story, the main figure is a fifty-year-old man who has gone bankrupt and has been rejected by his old friends. In order to annoy them, he decides to invade their gardens wearing a bathing suit and swimming through all the pools of the county (there is also a famous film version with Burt Lancaster).

In the Levi’s ad, the swimmer is much younger and, instead of a bathing suit, he wears a pair of jeans (The more you wash them, the better they get). But the rich people who observe the outsider while sipping their drinks are exactly like those described by Cheever: greedy, hypocritical, ambiguous. Here advertising aims high since it dares to criticise the American way of life.

Instigation No. 6: Kill the consumer.

The consumer is already dying. His agony began in the ’90s, but how many noticed it? So, the consumer is apparently alive — but what we see in ordinary advertising is a ghost, a spectre, a phantom, a replicant, a zombie, a mask, a virtual entity.

The consumer is dying, and this is probably the main issue that concerns contemporary advertising.

Being a “consumer” is like being human only when — and by — “consuming”. People are more than just “consumers”. Consumers are an invention of marketing. We should consider the word “consumer” an insult. Defining individuals by only one of their aspects is somewhat racist or at least politically incorrect. People are people — more than simple buyers, eaters, drinkers or drivers. People are people — even when they buy, eat, drink or drive.

Old-fashioned, dead advertising often originates from seeing people simply as “consumers”. Seeing people as consumers was unquestionably a help in an era of marketing pioneerism. It was a concept coming from studies on economics, and contributed to making marketing andcommunication a scienc(inatead of a mere instinctive and empirical issue). Now, words like “consumer” — as well as the whole current marketing phraseology — risk limiting imagination, or confining our way of thinking to a sphere of pure abstraction. Repeating the same old slang kills the fantasy the world needs. Brands need a fresh, more human approach, and this approach does not appear if our minds are filled with stereotypical marketing language.

Marketing slang is far from everyday life. It turns life events into handbook cliches and advertising routine. The best contemporary advertising is based on the death of the consumer and the rebirth of the person. The commercials we have mentioned so far are examples of humane understanding: there are no evident traces of “marketing dust” in the ads for The Guardian and The Independent. There are no “consumers”, but real people in Whassup (whose claim is, in short, True) or in Levi’s ads — just ordinary people with their problems and their defects. And even though staging wickedness is very trendy (see the bad boy for Rob, see the cynicism in the dot-corns such as Aucland and Outpost), you may try to recover good feelings, on condition that they are “more real than the real thing”; for example, the campaign for the Seattle SuperSonics where the basketball champions visit real houses and rest homes and the camera films exactly what happens.

The protagonists of two Guinness masterpieces, Swimblack and Bet on black, are not “consumers”, but 100% people. In the first one, an old man of Italian origin apologetically tells the story of his brother, a former swimming champion, who, in spite of his age, persistently tries to reproduce hisyouthful records. In the time needed to tap a Guinness beer, he reaches his goal. The fact is that — out of love and compassion — everybody makes his illusion possible. Actually, the barman starts his action late to give the old champion a considerable lead. Good things come to those who wait. This is no mere marketing: it is an astonishing insight into the problem of getting old, in a context of real human relationships, with the narrative flair of a great feature film compressed in a few seconds. It is advertising, but does not look like advertising.

In Bet on black, we are in Cuba in the 1940s and preparations for a mysterious tournament are in full swing. The frames of people, environments and objects create a realistic social fresco while mambo is everywhere. The betting room is crammed with excited people. Everybody is betting. It is a speed race for snails. Each snail has a number cut into its shell. Apparently the mollusks do not react to the starting shot, but after a few seconds of total immobility, they dash off along the track. When the winner crosses the finish line, everybody starts partying and rivers of beer begin to flow. Once again, Good things come to those who wait. In my opinion, it is an absolute masterpiece. You can see it as a formula-one snail race, but also as a poetic documentary on the tropics in the forties — poverty and excitement, cruelty and hope, madness and dirt.

Instigation No. 7: Kill superficiality (put world vision into brand vision).

And here we are at the last – and subtlest – of our exercises: introducing ethical and social implications into brand values. In the two Guinness commercials, there is a clear aspiration to go beyond therand, beyond marketing, beyond advertising. Even though the commercial message is extraordinarily exclusive and effective (Good things come to those who wait), in both cases the authors touch deep aspects of life: physical decline, nostalgia and pity felt for the former champ, social depression, casting out, the illegal and dark world of betting and finally, low price joy in the other commercial.

In recent years all of Levi’s commercials can be seen as having a “social background”: from the young man taking his clothes off in the laundry to the recent saga of Flat Eric. Levi’s stories are about a generation of rebels, and speak in various ways of conflict born of a generation gap. In Levi’s advertising, adults have no way out. They are stupid, arrogant, opportunistic, greedy, ambiguous, furtively degenerate – at best, simply hypocrites. The young, instead, personify intellectual honesty, courage, sincerity, inner clarity, independence, rebellion. They are the heralds of new values, purer, often provocative. One of these values is Eros. Eros and beauty, in Levi’s ads, assert both physical and spiritual superiority.

One of the most striking – and famous – examples of this strategy is Drugstore. An American small town, 1920′s, blackand-white images to simulate an old film: a silent movie punctuated by an anachronistic, very strange piece of techno music (Kubrick docet). A young man gets out of a van, enters the drugstore, buys condoms and puts the packet in the watch pocket of his jeans (Watch pocket created in 1873. Abused ever since).

In those days, buying condoms was a very verboten action and the shopkeeper’s face moves from admiration to male complicity. But the expression on his face radically changes that night, when the young man knocks at his door; he is dating the shopkeeper’s daughter.

This is an ad for a jeans brand, but it seems a public utility campaign. Furthermore, it conveys controversial feelings and values, polemically opposing the ethics of the man in the street.

The campaigns which dare tackle social themes – developing more open and ambitious viewpoints and ways of thinking than those required by traditional marketing – are something you’ll never forget. Nobody will ever forget 1984 for Apple Macintosh, where a girl smashes with hammer blows the large video through which Big Brother controls and dominates a society of slaves. Apple’s Think different advertising is as memorable. The great rebels of the 20′ century set an example. From Einstein to Bob Dylan, from Martin Luther King to John Lennon, from Gandhi to Picasso – people who have been able to look at things from an unusual point of view, without hypocritically respecting the status quo, and who have strenuously fought to change the world and make civilization progress.

These “high” values provide a strong and indestructible foundation to communication strategies and, with time, they can become extraordinary properties for a brand (especially in cases with greater consistency, as in the examples of Levi’s and Apple). Messages conveying a “vision of the world” need not be too serious: Levi’s ads often succeed in harmonising deep concepts and light humor. (We smile at the very macho taxi driver w o is extremely gallant with his beautiful passe ger until she takes a razor out of her bag and “she” touches up her beard: a provocation against the hypocrisy of male chauvinist pigs and intolerant people.

The commercial Haircuts for HBO is definitely comic; it’s a fake documentary film about Tylersville, a typical Midwestern small town, where life goes on between home, church, school, stadium, court and the barber’s shop. The strange thing is that all the male citizens of the town show off the most absurd and improbable coiffures with paradoxical ease. Badly cut hair makes a fine showing on the heads of children, adults and even the dead in a comically senseless way. But all the actors act naturally and realistically, as if having hair cut in such a patently absurd way were perfectly normal. Finally, the mystery is cleared up. The fact is that Carl, the barber, cannot take his eyes off his favorite channel while cutting his customers’ hair: Carl the barber, HBO subscriber since 1976.

Apart from the joke and the healthy amusement that this ad inspires in TV viewers, it is an intelligent, mischievous and trenchant document of twenty-four hours in the social life of a remote American town. A Canadian campaign for Molson beer (Bensimon Byrne D’Arcy, Toronto) is based on an unexpected and inventive social insight. A sort of contemporary Lenny Bruce steps onto a stage to claim – publicly and with authentic passion – his national identity (“Jam a Canadian”), thus making a clean sweep of all prejudices that still make Canada an incomplete country, half French colony and half U.S. colony.

In Contemporary Ideal Advertising, then, there is room to make a judgment and to comment on the real world, on awareness and all-important contents. It is, of course, flammable material, to be handled with care. But the game is worth the candle.