Advertising
Very special old bread
Philip Kleinman
Well, bless my soul, how time does fly. It seems only the other day that I was writing in these columns about the latest crop of advertising awards and mentioning in particular the gold prize given to the Collett Dickenson Pearce agency for a couple of picturesquely nostalgic TV commercials for Hovis.
The occasion was the National Broadcast Advertising Festival, and I managed to annoy its organisers by referring to the disgruntlement expressed by some admen who feel that awards tend to be monopolised by a small mutual admiration society of people in the more self-consciously "creative" agencies.
But, of course, it wasn't the other day. It can't have been since the Broadcast Festival was scrapped this year for financial reasons. It was in fact a year and a quarter ago. I took the trouble to check this after I went to a dinner at the Hilton last week to see a fresh crop of award-winning press ads and commercials exhibited on a special screen, Blow me down if they didn't include the very same Hovis films.
These awards were given by the Designers and Art Directors Association, which casts its net slightly wider than the ad business. The Hovis films received only a silver this time, but Colletts wasn't complaining. Out of 46 awards of one kind or the other the agency took nine, including the gold for the best advertising campaign of 1974. This was judged to be its work on Army recruitment, done for the COI.
The same agency also earned silver awards for two of its commercials for Benson and Hedges cigars. One is the him in which a waiter in a train pulls the communications cord to allow him to light a costorner's cigar properly. The other shows an attempt by a secret agent to pass a message to a presumed contact, who turns out to be a mere passer-by delighted to take a proferred cigar and quite uninterested in the rolled-up message, which he uses to light it with.
Both films are very funny, very well made, quite unmistakably the work of that particular ad agency and equally unmistakably bound to win the approval of the Designers and Art Directors Association. Colletts has, after all, been winning DADA awards for its Benson and Hedges commercials for as far back as most of us can remember.
Three other agencies — all in the "creative" circuit — won 13 awards between them. They were Doyle Dane Bernbach, Saatchi and Saatchi and Boase Massimi Pollitt. The latter's prize-winning films include those made for its Unigate milk campaign, for which it invented the concept of the Humphrey, a mythical creature which steals the precious fluid, as well as commercials for Courage beer and Cresta soft drinks.
Doyle Dane's and Saatchi's winning ads include posters foryolkswagen and the Health Education Council. Again the same agencies have been getting prizes for their work for the same clients in the same styles for a long time This is not to say that they don't deserve them — when it comes to design and filmic values the "creative" agencies have not acquired their reputations by accident. How far the wit and imagination they specialise in helps to sell any particular product is another question and one which has been, is and will continue to be hotly debated.
Anyway it was nice to see the DADA gold for the best single commercial of 1974 go to a relatively unfashionable agency called Thomas Hugo Ketley Browne for another COI film designed to frighten parents into taking precautions to stop their children from starting fires. It achieves its end quite remarkably through sound effects and pictures of empty rooms without showing either human beings or flames.
On the whole the films were more impressive than the newspaper and poster advertisements, which perhaps proves something about where the bright boys in agencies think they can do their careers the most good. But any layman who's interested in the printed stuff can see it on display until June 27 at Capital Radio's offices in Euston.
Previous page
