My favourite advertising campaign of all time is Hamlet cigars. Hilariously funny, incredibly imaginative, and strongly effective in selling the cigars. It won numerous advertising awards.
If you haven’t seen it go to youtube. It took a couple of ads to really get into its stride so have a little patience.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIckHmwZAeI
But what makes this really special for me is that it sells Hamlet as a cigar for losers – poor golfers, men with bad rugs, cuckolded men, men in neck-braces. If something can go wrong in a Hamlet ad it will. Hamlet is, of course, your consolation.
But the point is there are no winners here. This is not an optimistic, upbeat view of life. Life is crap but at least there’s Hamlet.
I find this so refreshing. Almost every advertising brief I see talks about how this or that brand is for people whose glass is half full, for positive, optimistic people, for winners or people who would like to see themselves as winners, how we don’t want any negativism in our advertising.
The fact is there are more losers in life than winners. Life is often crap. Just ask a Maple Leafs fan. That doesn’t mean you should be miserable. After all Maple Leaf fans have 1967 and hope for the future, and Hamlet smokers have a great cigar.
Advertising that acknowledges that things aren’t always perfect strikes a chord with way more people than the unrealistic happy smiling people we see most of the time.
