Celebrities: the first refuge of lazy thinking

If advertisers find the hard work of getting the right celebrity and the right script for an ad too much, then the result will be a lazy, counter-productive mess, says Dominic Mills. So which two high profile actors have been lured into the latest car-crash ads?

Readers of a certain age may remember a shadowy showbiz fixer called Alan Cluer, whose main function in life was to put celebs and ad agencies together.

If you remember many of the classic celeb ads of the 90s and early 2000s – Bob Hoskins and BT, Naomi Campbell and Claudia Schiffer for Vauxhall, Dudley Moore for Tesco, Henry Kissinger for the Economist – then Cluer was your man.

Cluer died last year, but if he were alive today he would be turning in his grave at two recent examples of celeb-led campaigns that broke last week: James Nesbitt for Thomas Cook and Bradley Cooper for Haagen-Dazs.

There are endless arguments to be had about the merits of using celebs – regardless of whether they are actors or just famous people – but as Cluer told me during a lengthy interview in 2006, one of the secrets of using a celeb is great casting and a great script.

On both these scores you have to say Thomas Cook and Haagen-Dazs fail completely.

Casting is a alchemic process: it doesn’t matter if the celeb is playing themselves as brand spokesperson or a role, if you get it wrong that’s all your money down the drain.

Cluer put it succinctly: “if the audience asks themselves ‘how did they get so and so to be in that ad?’ and it takes them five seconds to work out they paid them a lot…”.

In other words, they have to be relevant and credible.

For Thomas Cook, James Nesbitt plays a hapless dad who keeps cocking it on up on holiday. Nesbitt is a good actor – and he did a great job for Yellow Pages a few years ago – but here he’s just, well, James Nesbitt taking the money. Awful, clunky script, awful acting (expensive hairpiece, though).

And that’s the problem. You are never going to believe in the character or, equally, that the real James Nesbitt would go on a Thomas Cook holiday.

For Haagen-Dazs, Bradley Cooper (Silver Linings Playbook, the Hangover series, all-purpose Hollywood hunk of the month) does at least play himself – after a fashion. In the ad, he wanders round a ritzy chateau -‘The House of Haagen-Dazs’ no less – scoffing from a tub of ice-cream.

Amongst a crowd of beautiful people, sexy model Jana Perez spots him and takes him off for a bit of you-know-what. But she only makes a half-hearted attempt to undress him because – take a deep breath – she’s really interested in the ice-cream.

So how does it do on casting? Well, Cooper is obviously an object of lust for the Haagen-Dazs target market (25-34-year-old females), so that’s sort of ok. However, given the limited use to which he is put, Haagen-Dazs is gambling that the audience will know who he is. Seems a big gamble to me.

And the script? Well, there is none in the literal sense, because we are in that parallel world called ‘globo-land’ where speech and language limit the countries you can show the ad in. Plus celebs cost more if they have to learn lines.

How did we end up here? Well, it’s what happens when clients want instant cut-through in a world of media fragmentation. The short-cut route is a bit of ‘borrowed interest’ (i.e. a celeb).

There’s nothing wrong with that. But that’s when the hard work starts in getting the right celeb and the right script. Until then, it’s the lazy option.

By the way, if you want to see an ice-cream brand with a similar target market to Haagen-Dazs (but a cheaper price point) putting in the hard advertising work, celeb-free, take a look at the Cornetto Cupidity series of short films on YouTube. Now that’s what I call great casting and scripting. And not a celeb in sight.

Why Barry the platypus is really a Brit

Last week I lamented the lack of ads that played up to our sense of Britishness – defined best by applying this simple test: could this ad run anywhere but in Britain?

And then along comes this gem from JWT for First Direct, starring a platypus called Barry. Found only in Australia, the platypus is the world’s strangest creature – feet and bill like a duck and furry coat like a beaver, plus it’s a mammal that lays eggs.

But Barry is a very British platypus, a vinyl-loving, matey, sociable denizen of East London who likes nothing more than to pop down the local.

So far, so surreal. But that’s the point because he’s the face of First Direct which, while it may be 25 years old, wants to be seen as the challenger brand that’s friendly, quirky, irreverent – and a bit different.

You could say First Direct has become a bit staid of late, but it’s also true that no other bank – Virgin Money’s efforts haven’t amounted to much – has filled that space, which means that it’s there to reclaim. If nothing else, these ads stand out, and not just in the banking sector.

The real test, however, will be whether First Direct sticks with Barry for the longer term. Appointing a platypus as your brand spokesperson is a bold move for any brand, let alone a bank. First Direct has so far avoided the opprobrium thrown at the banking sector (even though its parent, HSBC, hasn’t) but he’s vulnerable to lots of things: bad results, change of management, change of agency, change of strategy and so on.

But let’s enjoy him while we can, and celebrate a very British ad; and watch out for the zebra in the end frame.

Oh no, the world’s going native

My fellow columnist Greg Grimmer last week offered us a timely sanity check on the latest buzz term of native advertising.

Just Google it, and you’ll find a mere 220 million references, and growing exponentially.

It is, I fear, as insidious as Big Data, and therefore prone to much misuse. And since there seems to be little understanding of what it really is, destined to provoke panic amongst advertisers.

It’s what you might call GMOOT (Get me one of those) syndrome. It’s where clients go “Help, everybody’s talking about native advertising/big data/blah blah blah. I must have a native advertising/big data/blah blah blah strategy NOW!”. Even though they don’t have a clue what it is.

So, just to be clear, as Mr Grimmer noted, native advertising is, in old money terms, advertorial or content marketing – i.e. an ad or marketing dressed up to look like editorial. Why they seek to gloss it over by calling it ‘native’ except to perplex and confuse I don’t know, except that it sounds so, well, organic and natural and friendly and nonthreatening.

So let’s call a spade a spade. However, if anyone thinks native advertising is going to be the elixir of digital, they better think again.

It’s difficult to do well, and can be very expensive to produce – just like editorial.