My favourite ad is that Cadbury advert that came out in the early 2000s:

Till this day I think it’s one of the most amazing adverts, it literally holds you from beginning to end. It starts off with the epic Phil collins singing “I can feel it calling in the air tonight”, as we zoom in on the face of a gorilla intensely focusing on its impending task. 

It breathes in and out, waiting, buffering getting ready for the beat drop. It even huffs the camera away as if it was actually in the way. And as the drums kick in, it starts smashing down on the toms with all the passion a fake gorilla can give and keeps going. Till this day I’m still unsure if it was a guy in a gorilla suit or an actual trained gorilla, either way much respect!

The tag line for the ad was Dairy milk chocolate, a glass and a half full of joy.

Now I’m not exactly sure how effective the ad was, as in I don’t know how the sales changed after it was dropped. But I will say this, it entertained me for sure and it stayed with me till today.

We are learning a lot in the course about strategy, about how to stick out of the grain with our work and more than anything else how we present a value to elicit a sale. So some pretty important stuff. It all starts with finding an insight, a truth that connects with our audience in a very authentic way. In other words, research! 

It was at that point that I realized, after spouting the word day in and day out, I actually had no idea what research meant. I remember the first time we got set a proper brief, my research was basic at best. I just typed in the product, looked at the first could links and then made stuff up.

Then Uri showed an example of research and I went as pink in the face as a black man could get. Do not sleep on research!!

We then use the insight gained from research to build a proposition that we can execute on. For Cadbury I’m guessing the brief was something like this:

Cadbury dairy milk chocolate is known for its classic taste and traditional presentation, but with a new landscape of exciting competitors we want to leverage non traditional approaches to reach a younger audience that may not find us as exciting. Of course just guessing.

Honestly I’m not 100% sure what the proposition was, maybe this is something I should research! But I’m imagining it went something like eating chocolate is fun and joyful experience, we need to embody that joy in a fun way for new audience.

Once that is done and you have the proposition go forth and start ideating, six hatting, bouncing ideas off every surface to come up with a response to the brief, before picking one and executing. Now I don’t know who approved of the drumming gorilla but man, till this day I still respect it. In this case I don’t think the goal of the ad was explicitly to sell units, rather to raise awareness and spread the message of how fun Cadbury chocolate is. Though honestly imagine it did probably increase sales by a good amount.

Not sure where this scab is coming from, but I think this ad is super effective in achieving that goal, and I hope I can make things as effective when I grow up as a creative!

@obiwuji