The Reason why I got into advertising in the first place is
because I was inspired. It wasn’t the money (not that there is great amount of
that anyway), It wasn’t the fame; It wasn’t a deep rooted love of marketing. I
was exposed to a burst of great advertising and just fell in love with it.
I wanted to make ads like those the Johnnie Walker android
commercial or the Harley Davidson live by it ad or even the BMW 5 series rocket
car commercial. They produced that
moment of shock and awe, when you just wanted to hit rewind and watch it again.
Every time that I sit down to write an ad I try to create an
idea that would evoke the same reaction that I experienced when I saw those
great ads, It had to be the utmost superlative reaction that would do and nothing else. I soon found
out that it was quite difficult to induce shock and awe while trying to sell sanitary
ware and even harder to do so with a client with a conventional approach to say
the least.
All was lost. I began to look at every brief in a more cynical
manner. No longer did I see how great an idea could be, I shrunk my canvas to
the confines of the product. The work I chalked out reflect my cynicism. Then I
stumbled upon the Widerow airline commercial .
I was speechless I kept looping the
video just to grasp how simple and beautiful it was. An airline commercial that
captured the magical essence of flight. It didn’t talk about cabin space, duration,
in flight movies or exotic destinations.
It s an old man and his grandson in a field in the middle of
Norway. This is what I assume the
leading lines of the creative team would have been while pitching this idea and
in essence that is what it is a simple dialog between two people. The thing
that makes this ad special is the way the scenario is played out. We are
introduced to it smack dab in the middle, wondering what exactly is going on
and then the final eight seconds of the ad just make you eyes go wide.
The reason why I am sharing this ad and talking about this
is because in a way it changed my perspective about how to approach an ad. It’s
now completely about big budgets and hours of production. At the end of the day
I m in the business of making people connect with a product. And it made me realize
that to do that I need to see the ad as a living breathing organism, something
with a heart and soul. Then and only then it can truly connect with people.
