I do wish advertising agencies would get these things right!

I would have thought that the alternative interpretation of this phrase would have dawned on someone, either at Publicis or Müller, well before the advert made it to mainstream television!

The first is the current Dentyl advert.  There’s a divide in our house on this one — I like it, while Dana doesn’t.  I understand the point that it’s a bit creepy having a man with a piano sitting in your bathroom (although, lets face it, if you had a big enough bathroom for a man playing a piano in your bathroom you’d probably have a big enough house to have a second bathroom you could use!), but I can’t help feel that the young lady in her pyjamas more than makes up for it.  I can also understand why Dana doesn’t appareciate that view.

The second advert (or, to be fair, series of adverts) is the current campaign for Cadbury Creme Egg.  The adverts dipict Creme Eggs finding ways to ‘release the goo’ using household items.  Basically, it’s a string of Creme Egg suicides.  The adverts are pretty amusing, but something just concerns me a little about them.  I can’t put my finger on it — perhaps there actually isn’t anything really, perhaps it’s just I feel I shouldn’t aprove of eggs committing suicide — but something just makes me think it’s not quite right.  That said the ads are very clever, and they have made good use of the internet and made the most of viral marketing tacticks very effectivley.  I gather this year is the second year they have run the same campaign.

This follows the three recent Dairy Milk adverts which have taken the UK by storm.  Now there’s obviously a difference between the two aproaches — the Creme Egg adverts are very short (around 10 seconds each) and there are a number of them along the same lines leading up to an impressive finale, while the Dairy Milk adverts are longer and clearly on a much higher budget — but there are similarities in the way they have harnesed the internet to get much greater coverage than they would have got simply by being on TV.  This made me wonder: the Dairy Milk adverts go under the “A Glass and a Half Full Productions” banner while the Creme Egg adverts don’t, but were they in fact from the same creative agencies?

Finding out about the Creme Egg adverts was reasonably easy.  It seems there was quite a bit of fuss made about it in the advertising press when it came out — the move away from ‘how do you eat yours’ being seen as a pretty significant change.  The agency behind these adverts is Publicis.  Finding out about the Dairy Milk adverts was harder.  The idea is that they have their own in-house production company making the adverts but in reality I thought this was unlikely.  And it turns out I was right, the creatives behind the Dairy Milk adverts is an agency called Fallon.

While I was researching this I found this Guardian blog post which asks a good question — do these adverts really make people go out and buy more chocolate?  It could be argued that the Dairy Milk adverts don’t aim to promote the product but to raise awareness of the brand and on that front I think they probably work but, when you’re talking about such a well known confectionary, will that tactick really gain them much?  I’m pretty sure if you were to ask people in the street to name a chocolate brand about 90% would name Cadbury’s Dairy Milk.  This is in comparison to Creme Egg, a product which is only produced between January and easter, and which I’m sure benifits enormously from simply being brought back to the mass conciousness.

Either way, Cadbury seem to have played a blinder with these adverts.  They made me sit up and watch an advert, and I’m certainly not the only person who has noticed them and decided to write about them.  While £3.7m might seem a lot to pay for a couple of kids wiggling their eyebrows for a minute, I’m sure if someone were to add up the value of all the blog inches generated from that minute of TV, it really would come out as great value for money.

Someone I thought might have burnt out by now is the bloke who does the voice over for a whole load of programmes on Channel 4, the Jingles on Absolute radio (formally Virgin), and pretty much everything else — Peter Dickson.  You’ll know who he is.  He seems to have been doing the rounds for ages.  Actually, it’s this particular voice he does which annoys me.  He can do other things (there are lots of examples on his website), but it seems that it’s that one voice media people think we want to hear.  I sometimes wonder if they ever bother watching other things or if they think they’re the first to discover this kind of things.

The reason I’m thinking about this is because currently on Channel 4 is Alan Carr’s Celebrity Ding Dong.  It’s really rubbish.  This week it’s ‘Fashionistas’ verses ‘Hard Men’.  The funny thing about it is that these ‘Hard Men’ are all actors.  I’ve been around actors since I was about 13, some of my closest friends are actors, and I work with actors in my professional work.  All actors are the same.  I worked with Ray Winstone in 1999 and he was the same.  They are all lovvies.  Celebrity Ding Dong proved this nicely — there was more hugging and giggling from the ‘Hard Men’ than from anyone else.  Including trend of the moment “I’m gay and going to build my entire act on it” Carr.

Forgive me, I’ve just spent the last half hour bitching and whining.  I’m off to go and fry myself a cheese sandwich, something I don’t think I’ve done since I was a student.  And very healthy.

Hmmm, well, this week is over, and it was pretty un-eventful.  We were only in college for 4 days because there was staff development on Wednesday, so I went to see Natalie and we spent the day together.  Its going to be another four day week next week because there is a strike by lecturers on the 5th.  I think I might go into college though, and just find a computer that I can do something on, so I’m not stuck at home (if I just stay in I wont end up doing any work, lol).  Have to see how I feel on the day.

I think I am going to stay at Natalie’s house tomorrow night, but other than that I have no plans for the weekend…I know I need to do another politics essay for Monday, and I have more notes to write up for it as well (actually I might save that for Tuesday…), but I have a few things to do for college (oh, including the analysis of my computing project that needs to be in for mid November (groan, lol)).  I have also decided on my 6th Uni as well – Hull.  It looks nice, and they do a good course…and it isn’t too far away either

Hmmm, so today I have done some more scraping of the wall in the bathroom today when I had some spare time – I was going to go for a wander with my video camera, but then when I was about to set off it started pouring down, so I had the afternoon of nothing to do and scraped the wall and slept a bit. And, just out of interest, something that is totally irrelevant and I didn’t do today, but a few days ago, I have got a new monitor – my old one’s switch went totally so I couldn’t switch it on, and my dad got one from his school where they were throwing them out.  Its a nice one though, hehe.

Last night was halloween (like I really need to say, lol), and there were some halloween-y type things on TV.  I was watching ITV quite late, and there was this program called ‘Haunted Halloween Live’ and it started by saying that the witching hour was almost there…the first thing I thought was that it couldn’t possibly be live – it was just gone half 1 in the morning, lol.  Anyway, I watched it in the hope that it would live up to its promises of having some exciting experiments to find ghosts in this haunted house in Greenwich.  It didn’t at all.  It was pretty awful really, it had a few mediums walking about saying they could feel coldness in certain places, and they did an experiment to try to capture some orbs of light on cameras…but didn’t.  At the end they obviously had about 15 mins to fill in so had people talking about it all, and trying to convince one of the presenters that he should believe in ghosts…it was, to be honest, awful.  I think it came from ITV2 because that is the website address it had at the end (which would explain why it wasn’t live – because it was a repeat)…and I suppose it might have been good if you were just staggering in from the pub after a night out on the cheap drinks of a Thursday night, but I thought it was awful.  One thing that annoyed me about it was that at the end they kept talking about all this wonderful footage they had caught on camera that night, and how they couldn’t wait to see it…but then we didn’t see any of it before the end of the program.  Very disappointing.  Hmmm, well, that is the end of my little rant about that (it had to be said!)…do you think I would make a good TV critic(?), hehe.

So, I’m offskies…