Archive for 19 February, 2009
I am woman, hear me whisper
The new Diet Coke ad from Mother had its first official airing last night during The Brits.
I can’t say that I exactly warmed to it – and I’m bang on target audience. Based on the ad, I’m led to believe that drinking Diet Coke will make you want to ride around on a bicycle in the middle of the night, singing your heart out, while women nearby (in scenarios direct from the Singleton Chick Flick Cliché Book) sadly sing along with you.
It’s almost as ridiculous as suggesting we should all be roller-skating in white jeans or skydiving at that time of the month.
I’m guessing the creative brief was something about Diet Coke enabling you to about taking a moment to remember who you really are and what makes you happy (a modern Diet Coke Break for the downturn).
But there’s nothing empowering or engaging about the execution. Every non-Duffy woman in the ad comes across as weak and some kind of blokeless loser, buying singleton ready meals late at night or stuck on the Girl’s Night Out from hell. Duffy doesn’t come out of it all that well either, I don’t think the song particularly suits her style or range.
To be honest, I not impressed with the endline ‘Hello You’ either. It just doesn’t sit right and reminds me too much of Avon’s Hello Tomorrow.
So then, in short, I’m not a fan.
Judge for yourself:
A bit of detective work via google, youtube and itunes reveals that the song I’ve Gotta Be Me was recorded by Sammy Davies Jr. in the late 60s and originally came from a musical on Broadway at that time called Golden Rainbow. Here’s the man himself in action (starts 25 secs in):
we’re all doomed…right?
So, the economy is in free fall and we’re all doomed. Right?
The quallies at work have been doing a lot of focus groups with Credit Crunched Mums recently. Apparently yes, Mums are being careful and trying to be more frugal – but a lot of them are doing so not because they are very worried about their finances right now, but because they think things are going to get worse before they get better.
I think we might be talking ourselves into making the economic situation worse. The media isn’t exactly helping, a quick dig round nexis revealed dozens of recent case study stories about families who were cutting back and lots of first-person pieces by jounros describing how they were economising madly, but nothing suggesting that just maybe, a few people were actually carrying on pretty much as normal.
It’s admirable if someone decides to live more frugally now in order to try and safeguard their immediate future. But with every scare-monger story the media puts out, perhaps it has got to a point where people are taking more severe steps then they really need to, in turn bringing about the next step of the downturn they were trying to protect themselves against in the first place…
So to fire us all up, here’s the rather brilliant (if a little USA-centric) 40 inspirational speeches in 2 minutes from overthinkingit via ThoughtSpurs:
