Banging The Drum For Campaigns (And The Odd Gorilla)

There’s no-one else in marketing who tells it quite as straight (and swearily) as Mark Ritson, and here he is at his best (if not sweariest) on a subject dear to my heart: campaigns.

So much of what Ritson says here rings true…and more importantly is evidenced not just by Cadbury’s, the IPA’s Effectiveness Grand Prix winner last year, but by our Databank of effectiveness case studies more generally.

Campaigns create compound effects, because each new execution of an established idea not only adds something fresh but cements our underlying, previously understood impression of a brand.

If you see the world in pictures: think stalagmites.

They are Raymond Loewy’s design principle in advertising form: 80% familiar, 20% new.

Having grown up in a world of campaign best practice at AMV and Lowe, I’ve spent 30 years arguing for them in both client and agency boardrooms (because there are people on both sides of the advertising contract who are too quick to move on creatively).?

I even wrote an open letter in the Sunday Telegraph to the then beleaguered Tesco boss Philip Clarke, unsuccessfully lobbying for the return of ‘Every Little Helps’ in 2012.?Now back as part of the Tesco brand furniture, courtesy of BBH.

I’m a massive admirer of the Cadbury campaign also (and, like Ritson, the ‘Garage’ execution).?I’m on record somewhere applauding its relatively friendless debut five years ago, and I’ve even been known to sneak admiring text message to my pals at VCCP as it’s gone from strength to strength. (I don’t do that for everybody.)

So: a resounding yes to his case for campaigns.?

It’s just a shame he had to take the wind from my fanboy sails by setting up ‘Gorilla’ as his antithesis.

Full disclosure: I was one of the folk squeezed into a Maple Cross meeting room when Fallon first presented that monster commercial and relaunched both Dairy Milk and Phil Collins’ career.

As Ritson himself reports, ‘Gorilla’ wasn’t a one-off execution but rather the first in a series of ‘Glass and a Half Full Productions’: age-old product proposition reborn as advertising platform.?

He’s right about the difficult second album (aka ‘Trucks’), albeit it’s an execution that went down better IRL than in adland, not least because Cadbury’s full promotional heft was put behind it in-store. An effectiveness pointer in its own right.

And he’s right that ‘Eyebrows’ was a worthy follow-up once we had loosened our grip on the putter.

So a more precise accusation might be that ‘Glass and a Half Full Productions’ was a less good campaign than the current one.

Whatever, there’s no doubt it all worked at the time, as evidenced in a winning IPA paper, an annual report subtitled ‘The Year of the Gorilla’ and indeed an excitable takeover bid.

And even if the campaign did run out of steam under new ownership, there’s no doubt that ‘Gorilla’ itself went on working for quite some time: it was named Britain’s favourite TV ad years after its last airing and still crops up in group discussions today, I’m told.?

Perhaps, on occasion, executions can have legs as well as campaigns?

Laurence Green is the Director of Effectiveness at the IPA.

The latest IPA Effectiveness Awards/Thinkbox Brand Film telling the story of the "There’s a glass & a half in everyone" campaign will premiere on Thursday 12 October during EffWorks Global 2023.

The opinions expressed here are those of the author and were submitted in accordance with the IPA terms and conditions regarding the uploading and contribution of content to the IPA newsletters, IPA website, or other IPA media, and should not be interpreted as representing the opinion of the IPA.