Bestads Top 6 of the Week reviewed by Magnus Thorne and Paul Turner, Pulse Group, London
Almost all great contenders here. Cats as evil criminal masterminds. Men in panto dog costumes, and pure house porn. Someone’s been enjoying themselves. If we run the pure entertainment filter over these, which seems the only fair way, the spot we’d most like to watch again immediately has to be the winner, which this week is Queer Lisboa’s gay cliche ad for their film festival. It’s almost unfair as the script clearly wrote itself for this project, but it’s just brilliantly done. We suspect this might be the best film at the festival, but who cares if it gets finely toned waxed and tanned bums on seats.
Runner up is awarded to VW, which is a great script, and could have been a really funny product demo, but it just doesn’t feel like the edit quite does it justice. Blame the director. Unless he did in fact cut a viral version with the beloved VW key fob being cleaned off at the close.
An excellent selection this week with beautiful executions throughout and on occasions some beautiful thinking too. But if there has to be one winner, for our money it has to be the ad for UIC Washing Up Liquid. In one compelling image you have a superb product demo and a wholly original view point that turns the grotty kitchen sink into something much more special. It’s a classic and proves that the classic principles of bringing a USP to life are just as important as they ever were.
In close second comes the BlueMotion Label for VW, which is a really neat idea for getting magazines recycled (when you realize there isn’t much recycling available in Cape Town). And it is this green thinking that is used to justify why this idea is right for BlueMotion (VW’s technology to reduce environmental impact)… but it is this slightly tenuous link that relegates it to second behind UIC.
Some impressive candidates again and in any other selection the St Matthew in the City Church poster, supporting the campaign for same sex marriage, would be a winner. But today it finishes second â also let’s face it, some briefs are just too good for the work not to be brilliant, and this is definitely the case here.
The winner, though, is a poster that gets round one of the biggest challenges going â namely government health and safety comms. But the Anti Dengue Mosquito poster produced for the Filipino Department of Health just gets better and better the more you think about it.
On the face of it you’ve got a simple ‘tips to avoid’ style approach beloved of governments everywhere, that usually end up hung on the back of doctors doors (at best) or (more likely) forgotten about altogether. But the really smart thing here is that the poster itself is impregnated with mosquito repellent â and a more compelling reason to take it home and hang it on your own bedroom wall we can’t think of. And once up, it’s there telling the target audience exactly what else they can do to avoid these mosquitoes.
A brilliant and simple piece of thinking that communicates and gets people to act… and any poster which can really do that is deserving of the title ‘Best’.
Spoilt for choice. We picked a good week, or a bad one. The coffee stunt is a pleasure to watch back and shows brilliant use of a radio station partnership. We’re sure it’ll clean up elsewhere, but as this category is here to champion ideas you truly interact with, there’s a stronger point to be made. Interactive tends to default to digital, and digital tends to default to ‘low budget’. And this week we’ve got two beautiful examples of how it should be done and how proper hard currency should be allocated to doing it.
The winner is Virgin airways, with their interactive walk through of the flight experience. It’s just a stunning production with as much love and care and artistic flare as their TV ad extravaganzas, and it’s packed full of interactive touches and extra content, maybe not groundbreaking but flawlessly installed within the experience. This feels like the future of TV ads, not just air travel.
Runner up and a very close second is Philips. Again nothing too clever about the idea, but charmingly executed in a way that grows on you the longer you stay with it and play with it. A touch self indulgent perhaps, more art project than marketing, but still a beautiful demonstration that digital interaction isnt just about like or follow.