Most ads are mesmerically dull, jaw-droppingly tedious and unsullied by anything that could be mistaken, however remotely, for an idea. So how refreshing (pun intended!) are the new Carlsberg ads?!
If ever there were a beer in need of being rebranded, it was surely Carlsberg! Some of you will probably remember that bizarre ad of theirs from back in the day.
A man walks down a corridor, but stops to answer the phone he hears ringing in a room. Turns out it’s the Carlsberg Customer Complaints Department — you can see it here.
That’s hardly the sort of thing you want people to see in your ad! If anything, you should be telling them that when they drink Carlsberg, they won’t have anything to complain about at all!
But worse is to come. The ad concludes with an endline that says, “Carlsberg; probably the best larger in the world.”
Probably! Any of the more experienced ad men will tell you that you should really steer away from words like “probably”. “Definitely” would have been much stronger.
That same ambiguity was all over one of their more recent campaigns. “Carlsberg don’t do…” it went, and then they showed you all sorts of things that Carlsberg didn’t do. Like holidays, apartments, the list was endless. How negative is that?! Don’t tell us what Carlsberg doesn’t do! Tell us some of the things that it does, like refreshing the parts that other beers cannot reach!
And they finished with that hopelessly defensive endline, again! Probably the best larger in the world!
Well as the fella said, if it’s broke, fix it. So it’s wonderfully refreshing (there it is again!) to see the much more positive ads that they’ve now come out with.
The first one appeared on our screens last summer. It gently references an obscure indie film from the 60s starring Steve McQueen. A man is sentenced to life in a health spa, but he fashions an escape, a great one if you will, and is rewarded with a crate (gedit!!) of Carlsberg.
And the new endline that it now finishes with? “That calls for a Carlsberg!”.
Thank God! That dreadful diffidence has been replaced with firm, manly assertiveness. Would it be hyperbole to suggest that it is to ads what Steve McQueen was to method acting?
The second, in what I hope will be a long running campaign, is out at the moment. Once again, an obscure indie film from the 60s is referenced, this one by Stanley Kubrick. “I am Sparticus” they all shout. And they end up drinking over-lit pints of Carlsberg in an anemic Euro bar floating above a teenage graphic artist’s much, much younger brother’s vision of the future.
It’s hip, urban, and edgie. More to the point, it’s absolutely hilarious! And it ends on that glorious endline.
As much as I’d love to be able to claim that they’d devised the campaign here in Dublin, it is alas the work of Fold7 in London. Hats off to you, people. What can I say; that calls for a Carlsberg!
If there are any ads that you’ve seen, that you think are as incredible as those traffic-stopping pair of Carlsberg ads, drop me a line in the comment box below.
I don’t of course believe you. But I would be curious to see them.
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