The one that makes it worthwhile

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.