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Lately I have made it a point to keep the channel turned on to the ads instead of having my husband flip past them with the remote. Why? Because they have caught my attention for the advertising creativity and style. Interestingly, both ads are for cars, but watching them is so interesting that I cannot turn them off.
The first is for the Kia® model called the Soul®. It is from all appearances a tiny thing, and that fits the "characters" in the ad, which are hamsters. It starts off with these pets running their tread wheels along a stretch of road. They are positioned in what might be automobiles, out for a ride. But in their wheels the little creatures go nowhere. Then suddenly another party of hamsters appears. The four of them are inside a car, happily cruising along, playing the radio and tapping their little paws to the music. They take scant notice of their contemporaries in the wheels, but happily continue with their drive to somewhere else. I was relieved when a visit to Google® assured me that the hamsters seated in the car were MODELS. The real thing could NEVER have been trained to do what the "passengers" were doing. I liked that commercial because of the little animals (hamsters are cute and friendly) and the fact that they make the point that you CAN go beyond your limits if you choose the proper means. The personification makes the hamsters even more likable and believable as drivers and passengers. The only downside is that it portrays the Sole® as a car that only fits hamster-sized people. The other car commercial is for the Toyota Prius®. In this case, the car is secondary to the clever use of human acrobats to become trees, flowers, rocks, and other parts of the landscape. For anyone who has ever seen their child portraying an object in a school play, it becomes easy to imagine the costumed people becoming all of these things. They grow, bloom, and wave in the breeze as the Prius® passes by. For a moment, I imagine the munchkins in the movie "The Wizard of Oz", but this commercial is way beyond that in the use if computer graphics. As usual, Google® provided me with information on the thought behind this commercial. A segment about it on YouTube® featured all the ad people who participated in its creation, including a Japanese man whose verbiage had to include the English version on the screen in subtitles. His point was that the commercial had to include the idea that the new Prius® was truly a product of a melding of earth, people, and machines. This was truly a NEW CREATION, and the people who undertook the project reflected on its uniqueness and the difficulty in production. There were 200 "extras" cast in the roles of grass, trees, clouds, and even a waterfall. The costume designer explained that all the costumes had to work together and move with the changing landscape and move in sync as the car moved by. Another production man explained that the ad was conceived in computer pieces that had to finally be put together. I recommend that anyone interested in advertising click onto "Toyota Prius® Commercial". The only other commercial that has made drastic improvements in selling its product is Charmin® toilet paper. On the premise that a bear defecates in the woods, it must need to finish its business with toilet paper, and the bear parents choose Charmin® for themselves and their youngsters. This string of commercials, with the cute, cuddly bears replaces the older ones with a grocer named "Mr. Whipple" who admonishes shoppers saying "Please don't squeeze the Charmin®". I don't know about you, but I never squeezed rolls of toilet paper. I might have picked them up to check the price or to put them in my cart, but squeezing was not part of my plans
Google® again provided me with additional information about the Whipple situation, as follows: As I wrote this article it caused me to reflect back on the TV shows where these commercials appeared, and more importantly how insistent I was on having my husband use the capabilities of his DVR to pause programs so that I could watch the commercials. Watch the commercials? Yes, they were clearly more interesting to me than the post-holiday TV shows. The major networks have disintegrated into reality-type programs where "contestants" are either dancing, singing, or trying to remember what they learned in elementary school to win prizes. The "off" networks like USA, TNT, and DISC are playing re-runs of re-runs of old shows. But the commercials have fresh material and graphics that put TV's capabilities to better use. By doing that, they put the network programmers to shame! Just Mom |
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