Junior Planner

A rift of Bond related advertising swept over the nation in the past few weeks, as relentless and unpersonal as a tsunami. Perhaps we can forgive the host of companies for jumping on the Bond bandwagon. It presents a good opportunity to cash in on something which will have all eyes firmly rooted on it, and therefore whatever you advertise will also share a piece of that attention. Whether this strategy is a sensible one, or perhaps just marketing for maketing's sake, is a question even the secret agent himself would struggle to answer.

First up is my favorite of the lot, the Sony TV spot featuring Daniel Craig. A slow, computerised zoom-out (and then in) on Craig as his surroundings begin to explode and various debris crashes into his evidently steel tuxedo. It's easy to say that the advert lacks direction because it doesn't reveal its message (which is 'Bond in Sony High Definition') until the very end, and some might consider it a waste of audience 'thinking time' - they could be thinking about why they don't own a Sony HD TV instead of wondering why exploding debris is bouncing off the invicible Daniel Craig for the first 50 seconds of the advert.



All of these criticisms of the Sony Bond advert are valid, but also invalid. An advert for a High-Definition product needs to fulfill one simple aim: make TV look luscious, wonderful and beautiful. Do this and the audience will simply gawp, wonder why all of life isn't in HD, jump up and run to the local Comet to buy their life-sharpening new television. Does the Bond advert do this? Tick.


Sort of well done to Coca-Cola Zero for their Bond-related effort: a TV spot which employs the Bond theme song (a well executed collaboration between Jack White and Alicia Keys) and also the lavish animations which tend to run over the opening credits of a Bond film - you know, lots of naked ladies silhouetted so we can't see the naughty bits. It's pure and shameless cashing in on the Bond publicity, and instead I would actually like Coke to tell me what their new Zero drink is all about.Why should I drink it? Should I drink the new Pepsi drink because I can attach a huge balloon to my back and jump off a tall building? No.




Come on Coke and Pepsi - give me an advert which tells me about your drink. It's all very well putting out all of these cool cartoons and crazy stunts, but I'd like to see you sell your drink to me personally for once. It's largely irrelevant because I drink Diet Coke like a fish drinks water, and that fact is unlikely to change. Perhaps Coke know this and have just decided to leave me alone.

I would tell you about the other Bond related adverts, but the truth is they were all so obvious and lacked even the slightest bit of imagination. Samsung or Sony Ericcson, I forget which one, put their logo next to the 'Quantum of Solace' logo and called it a day. Avon decided to go the distance and produced a perfume called 'Bond Girl', and got new Bond totty Gemma Arterton to look stunning next to a picture of the bottle. It was all so plain and ordinary, and as I sat in the cinema, watching these adverts before the film began, I just felt as though I was being harrassed. In purchasing a ticket to see the film, I was forced into shameless direct selling.


The Bond film was not too bad, and you can read what I thought of it in my other blog:

http://the-to-do-or-not-to-do-list.blogspot.com/

But when I left the cinema, I was all Bond-ed out, and frankly, unimpressed with those that had jumped on the publicity bandwagon and taken me for a ride with them.