Cadbury's Trucks - advertising eats itself

Juan 'the man' Cabral serves up 'Mad Max' via Pixar's 'Cars' in an attempt to give us a glass and a half of joy for Cadbury's.

Whilst 'Trucks' would no doubt score pretty high on engagement when compared to most ads, it seems to lack the drama and downright audacity of 'Gorilla' or the glorious multi-sensory indulgence that was 'Balls'.

I'm not sure that 'Trucks' quite cuts it as a piece of pure spellbinding entertainment in the way that 'Gorilla' and 'Balls' do.

And I'm a gearhead with a life-long interest in aviation (sad, I know).

'Gorilla' and 'Balls' both went spectacularly viral because they were truly incredible pieces of entertainment.

'Trucks' is merely quite interesting.

The question is, will that be enough for Cadbury's given that the strategy that Fallon are using appears to lean heavilly on driving salience at the cost of creating an enduring link back to the brand.

In Hey Whipple, Luke Sullivan cautions that to be effective "your interesting device cannot just point to the sales message, it must be the sales message."

Sullivan goes on to quote a similar piece of advice from Bill Bernbach ("Stay with the product") before continuing to recommend that creatives should avoid getting "tangled up in unrelated ideas, however fanciful. There is no such thing as borrowed interest. Interest lasts as long as something is interesting. Interesting words make for a delightful sentence but not a persuasive one."

I'm sure others would no doubt disagree.

Comments

[Lbug]

I think "quite interesting" is being very kind. If everyone wasn't already eagerly anticipating the follow up to Gorilla, Trucks would be about as close to viral advertising as writing your brand name on a rock, putting it in a box and throwing it down a well.