Opinion: Australian advertising in it’s salad days.
Just pulling together a bunch of videos in one place as research for a piece I am writing for the Talk section of Australian Infront. Recently, a colleague (a Pom) derided ‘typical’ Aussie advertising as being shouty power point ads, I was quite stung by the comment and leapt to it’s defense, putting forth Meadow Lea, World Series Cricket and others, as my evidence. I put forth the idea that good old sing-a-long jingle ads are the typical Aussie ad. This process has, depressingly, served to highlight again how rubbish contemporary ads generally are.
A great collection of you tube clips, after the jump.
It was very amusing doing the research for this, and seeing so many 1980’s ads where the fashion and styling of the talent seemed to look like any number of hipster kids you’d see around Surry Hills these days.
The other great Australian ad technique is the catch phrase. There were a good few years where whenever did something wrong, stuffed something up or fewll over, there’d be some clown ready to sing out “Thats nooo how you make porridge”. The technique received a revival in the last decade, with modern equivalents “Not happy Jan”, “Tosser” and the Speed Kills campaign taking the ‘gesture brand’ approach with the waggling little finger.
This last one doesn’t fit into any category, but it’s quite simply awesome in that adorably annoying way.
