Of sing-song Smarties and slow-mo beer
Wammo, Pound & Mash delves into the dark, mysterious arts of selling sweet confections and refreshing beverages.
This piece of branded content for Smarties is cool but it also makes me wonder about the ‘fadiness’ of collaborations and the creation of social objects.
In this Aussie ad they pair a cute kid with a musician to make a song about one of the eight colours smarties comes in. The kid is on cute overload and it is well shot, put together and scored. It is really rather well done. The song about blue even works, so it’s the whole bit.
Some of the first comments on the YouTube clip are from people asking how it is going to sell the product because it doesn’t mention Smarties much, but I figure we can ignore any idiot that has missed associative advertising and brand building. But what does worry me is that it feels like an ad agency has just done a paint by numbers approach to currently fashionable trends in brand building. Take a musician/artist, do a collab, get a song, exploit the social object etc. This is a good example of the genre, but it made me feel like it is a genre. It isn’t at all organic because it is artificial: the kid isn’t really involved, it isn’t a real collab and they organised and ran it, which to be fair you’d have to do when dealing with kids.
But still, a lovely example.
And also this week an ad for Carlton Draught out of Clemenger BBDO Melbourne that is doing the business:
They are the people who did this ad:
And I love their understanding of how overblown the genre can be, with lines like ‘made from beer’ and the joke use of overblown operatic music and big themes for what is essentially a thing you drink while doing quite unromantic and underblown things.
The setting in the pub is rad and the overweight, uncoordinated and mistake-making dudes sell it. It would have been a blast to make and very hard to get the things perfect, like the pool ball and the spat food particle.
Slow mo is a great effect. They must have shot on a phantom or something similar that gives that frame rate to really own this hero shot of the unheroic approach. Very cool.
What do you think?