Bunnies, Fairies, and Unicorns

 These ads were done for The Eagle Awards. What they do is, they give awards to the best print ads done by South African brands or companies. And to encourage great print advertising, they’ve come up with a great print campaign. I can’t imagine it being very difficult, seeing as the judges for these awards would have had some part in the creation of theses ads.

The headline is similar in each ad, but slightly different. The thing they all have in common is, “Every time you make a bad ad…” Which is then followed by, “…a unicorn dies”, “…a fairy loses her wings”, or “…a bunny commits suicide.”

These ads, although laced with a dark humour, seem like they would destroy, or at least alter, any pleasant dreams you’d ever had about majestic unicorns, bouncing bunnies or dainty fairies. And in a way, this is the point of these ads. To make you think, ‘Awww, I don’t want that poor bunny to commit suicide because of my advertising.’ But this only works if you’re currently involved in the advertising industry, in one way or another. But then again, that’s their target market; people in the industry. The only other group they’d need to aim at would be people who enjoy good advertising. But then these ads can speak for themselves.

This type of advertising can only be good for everyone. The ad agencies realise that if they’ve been slacking, they need to buck up and starting “making magic”, the consumers seeing these ads get a good laugh or an ‘awww’ out of it, and The Eagle Awards get more entries. All’s well that ends well.

P.S. This is my last post reviewing ads, and next month I’ll be coming back with a fully fledged theme. See you then…

"You're in the advertising industry. You're suppose to lie."

Something a little less serious.

PPC Cement is a South African company that produces ready mix bags of concrete. They have always prided themselves on the fact that you're able to get 15% more concrete out of each bag.

This simple, and fun campaign shows how much further that extra 15% of concrete can go. They've used the hands of extremely large characters, such as, Optimus Prime, King Kong, and Godzilla. The characters, like what many people would do when they saw wet concrete, have pressed their hands into it, and signed their name.

The advertising agency, The Jupiter Drawing Room, Johannesburg, South Africa, has made a fun concept with what is normally a boring product. The headline reads, "Get 15% more concrete from every bag." It seems they didn't put as much work into the headline, as they put into the entire idea and concept. Fair enough, it is a strong visual, but the headline could've explained the idea a bit more.

With this concept, you also assume that one bag of PPC Cement, covers that perticular sized area. It doesn't seem like that much. Yes it could fit Optimus Primes hands in it, but it still seems like very little. Maybe if you work with concrete, or cement, you would know if that was a large amount or not. This being their target market makes up for it, but they could've still exaggerated the size of the area a bit more. Or atleast made everything else around it look smaller.

They've also included dates on each concrete slab, maybe indicating when these perticular characters were created. None the less, these dates are unclear unless you decided to delve deep into their advertising campaign and are willing to search for it. Many people just paging through a magazine would've have bothered too.

All in all, this print ad campaign has taken a quirky perspective on a normally boring product, and have done quite well with it.