Ad nauseam

I’m of the unpopular opinion that the the Cadbury’s drumming gorilla advert was rubbish. Man in ape suit sits about for a full minute, apparently ‘in the zone’, drums thirty second opening bars to early ’80s hit. Fade to title. Hardly worth 1,000 tribute videos on YouTube and an advert of the year award, is it?

A lot of the excitement was down to air-drums juggernaut In the Air Tonight. Of the various theories on the ‘philosophical subtext’ of the 90-second ad cooked up at the time, the best I heard was: “It’s about the GENESIS of MAN, being APE; y’know?”

And that’s the nature of advert music. It can make or break the whole campaign.

Cadbury’s latest commercial is proof of the importance (and difficulty) of getting it right. If you’ve already seen it, I think you’ll agree – it’s shit. Even with a backing track from Queen, who at their peak could’ve farted into a microphone for three minutes and won British hearts and minds, it’s stupendously boring.

While just as ambiguous as a drumming ape, without the distraction of a fitting soundtrack airport trucks racing each other across a runway comes across as that dick-curlingly cringeworthy E4 style of ironic eccentricity.

The commercial is part of a resurging trend amongst the ad-men: papering over a lack of good ideas by licensing music that’ll do the job for them. It’s a gamble. Sometimes sentimentality and cultural value get trampled in the rush to make an advert that’ll get people talking.

[Take Fosters’ latest commercial, featuring Violent Femmes’ Blister In The Sun. Yeah, it’ll evoke memories of booze-fuelled capers from the right demographic. But that’s likely to be quickly followed by utter contempt, once they realise the Aussie winos have taken a song whose adolescent-baiting appeal comes from the duality of its meaning (drugs and wanking) and changed the lyrics.

Another recent case is Specsavers’ wanton bastardisation of (the formerly blind) Edith Piaf’s Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien. Being honest, I don’t know much about Piaf outside of that one song. But even to my unsophisticated eyes, it’s a pathetically regrettable advert. Former revolutionary anthem reduced to a call to arms for cheap varifocals? A bit insulting.

Or is it? This cheapening of little pleasures is one of those things rooted in nostalgia that shouldn’t matter, but does. Using music that is already likely to be culturally or emotionally charged to hawk your product is a risky game. It’s asking people to let a brand jump into bed with cherished personal memories. If the pitch isn’t good enough, it’ll backfire. Badly.

Ok, no-one will ever be offended by this sort of thing enough to stop buying a product. But it’s easy for advertising to work inversely. You soon start seeing a brand as a synonym for ‘wankers’ (see the at-least-a-decade-too-late WKD ads.)

Bypassing the mainstream is the way forward. Ask Feist. It’s win-win. Hearing a catchy, obscure song on an advert is as uplifting as hearing a classic butchered is depressing. The artist gets deserved exposure; the brand gets recognised as being on the forefront of ‘cool’.

Just don’t use any of my favourite bands.