Take one for the team

The Cadbury's Nibbles Boutique

I was walking to work and saw a billboard advert about a binge-drinking programme for ITV. The line was a question like ‘Is binge drinking ruining Britain?’ and it has three good-looking girls in police uniforms smiling at camera looking a bit tipsy.

Now, I bet it didn’t start like this. I reckon the creative team would have wanted to be harder hitting with the image. Something like people passed out or running about with traffic cones on their head.

It looks like the client has watered down the image because they are worried about offending someone.

So, the take out of the billboard is more like ‘this doesn’t look like such a bad time to me. Looks like good fun’… and that really shouldn’t be the take out of an advert about binge drinking.

My point is that it might be good to get more creative types to convert to the client side. If someone who has a creative mind is buying the work, they’re more likely to understand where the creative team is coming from.

Awards would be won. Champagne would be opened and the advertising world would be more in harmony. But that’s a maybe!

For instance, Cadbury’s has got a very creatively minded client at the moment (previously from the Stella account) who obviously wants to buy good ideas e.g Gorrila, Eyebrow’s etc.

Their latest piece of work called the Nibbles Botique is very good indeed. The agency Hyper set up a pop up store on Carnaby Street in London that could only be viewed from the outside. Inside the store were scarf’s designed by a top designer and modelled by the very famous Caramel Bunny. The only way of getting one though was virtually.

People had to hunt on certain sites for banners that said that the shop was open. When they clicked through they were put into a virtual queue and then actually served by one of the shop assistants in the store. Apparently women were going mental trying to find the store banners to get one these limited edition scarf’s.

This idea is great that it goes online and offline. It floats my boat.

The website is here and more about it is here.

So, there must be creative types that will take one for the team to keep doing work of this standard?

Shotgun not me!