The 10 top ads of 2011

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Adhocracy

The 10 top ads of 2011

simon houpt

Globe and Mail Update

Published Thursday, Dec. 29, 2011 4:06PM EST

Last updated Thursday, Dec. 29, 2011 4:54PM EST

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Chalk up another reason to be thankful for moms. Even as the advertising industry races madly off in all directions with frenzied bids to get their clients’ messages in front of consumers – through Facebook apps, QR codes on wine bottles and billboards and banana peels, sponsored tweets, etc. – ad agency creative directors know they’ll still have trouble explaining to their moms exactly what it is they do.

But a great commercial? Ah. That requires no explanation. And so, even if TV advertising seems to be on the wane, the form is reaching ever higher, with mini-epics that tug at the heart, give voice to the voiceless, make us laugh, snag a moment in the cultural dialogue – and, yes, occasionally even sell something.

The best ads of 2011 reflect the ups and downs of our economy: after their brushes with death a few years ago, auto makers have found a bit of swagger – and so have their ads; Google makes us feel warm and fuzzy about its takeover of the planet; and Canadian ad agencies, who don’t usually have a free hand to spend as generously as their U.S. counterparts, found a way to grab attention this year by using some high tech that didn’t bust the bank.

These are, of course, subjective choices. So if you disagree, feel free to let us know. But please, leave your mom out of it.

The 10 top ads of 2011

1 of 10

Volkswagen Passat “The Force”

It’s hard to go wrong with Star Wars, but it’s also not easy to go as right as this pitch-perfect Super Bowl spot, which boasts sharp direction, snazzy editing, smart casting – and 60 seconds of sly humour, all impressively delivered without any dialogue. A tyke in a Darth Vader get-up spends a frustrating day trying and failing to use The Force to effect his inanimate surroundings: the washing machine, a sandwich on a plate, his sister’s little doll. So when his dad drives up in a new Passat, the kid races out to give The Force one last shot – and is astonished when the car starts up, apparently at his command. (In truth, dad has just used the car’s remote starter.) The child’s double-take is brilliant; viewers adored it and passed the video along to their friends, pushing the spot to almost 45 million views on YouTube alone.
Google “Dear Sophie”

For a company built on raw geeky brain power, Google is awfully good at understanding the heart. Following last year’s innovative heart-tugging ad “Parisian Love,” which told the story of a romance through search terms (and an effectively understated piano accompaniment), “Dear Sophie” is a more traditional montage ad (albeit with another perfect piano accompaniment), zooming through photos and videos from the first six years of a girl’s life that have been organized by her father into an interactive digital scrapbook using Google’s services (Gmail, YouTube, the Chrome browser) with the intention of showing her when she’s older. “I’ve been writing you since you were born,” reads an e-mail to the little girl from her father. “I can’t wait to share these with you some day.” Seriously, how cute is that?
Fallsview Casino “Lucky Dog”

We’ve never been gamblers, but Fallsview’s campaign promising that “anyone can get lucky,” almost spurred us to take a trip to Niagara Falls and try our luck. In this ad, a schmo sitting on a park bench attracts the interested eyes of two women in short succession, purely from a misunderstanding. The spot – like others in the campaign, including one in which a man who makes an unthinking comment is saved from his wife’s indignation after she’s conked on the head by a coconut – targets men perhaps a little too obviously. But then, men have always been an easier target for this kind of stuff; women don’t spend their days hoping to get lucky.
Nissan Leaf “Gas Powered Everything”

This 60-second spot achieves something rare, prompting us to look with new eyes at our surroundings. Sallow-eyed folk walk through their day using devices that are at once familiar (an alarm clock, a hair dryer, a cellphone, a dentist’s drill, a laptop) and foreign: They run on internal combustion engines, spewing exhaust fumes. “What if everything ran on gas?” asks a voiceover (by Robert Downey Jr.). And just as the full implication of that notion sinks in, we see a sunny shot of Nissan’s new electric car and its smiling driver, and the voiceover concludes: “Then again, what if everything didn’t?” It’s smart and succinct, and it gets bonus points from us for driving the climate-change deniers crazy.
British Airways “To Fly. To Serve”

Who knew the British would be the ones to put the romance back into flying? This 90-second spot flies through the history of British Airways – which neatly parallels the history of commercial aviation, from biplanes to the Concorde – guided by a faintly poetic voiceover. In a series of brief scenes that span the decades, we meet the First World War-era pioneers who took to the skies on a wing and a prayer, “their safety system of brain, and heart;” the pilots of the 1920s and ’30s; their mid-century successors who transformed “strange names from tall tales into pictures on postcards home;” and the modern flyers who “skimmed the edge of space, the edge of heaven, the edge of dreams.” This spot makes our hearts swell with pride, and we’re not even British.
Chrysler 200 “Born of Fire”

Eminem’s thunking and insistent Lose Yourself, gritty images of Detroit, a gospel choir in an empty theatre, glimpses of a black car moving nimbly through the misty night, and Eminem himself: This 120-second Super Bowl spot is a perfect piece of filmmaking that reminds Americans of the pride they once had in Detroit and its world-beating cars. On the surface, it’s a launch ad for Chrysler’s 200 sedan, but it’s also a rousing statement of purpose for the city itself. “This is the Motor City,” declares Eminem, staring aggressively into the camera, “and this is what we do.”
FedEx “Dominoes”

A couple of years ago, it seemed that Rube Goldberg had been appointed the patron saint of online ads; every few weeks brought another video featuring a cool contraption. This one is a little more straightforward, but you may still find yourself holding your breath to see if it all works out. A Canada Goose in Montreal drops a hockey stick into a FedEx package, which then knocks over about 3,000 other FedEx cartons on its lazy way down the East Coast to Miami, where a dog sitting at a desk seems a little surprised by the delivery. The Canadian-born spot, for the courier’s less-urgent service, almost makes shipping packages look like fun. Which, if you’ve ever been in a FedEx depot at closing time, is no easy feat.
Skittles “Touch: Cat”

Not just another cat video. Candy kept walking on the weird side in 2011, exemplified by this Canadian-born Internet-only ad. Viewers are invited to place their finger on a red dot in the middle of their computer monitor. A cat comes up and appears to lick the finger. Then a man dressed like a cat walks into the scene, gets down on his knees and, after licking the screen for a few seconds, looks directly into the viewer’s eyes. It’s freakily unsettling. The brand made a handful of ads like this – including one in which the viewer’s finger appears to stop an escaping thief – but this was the best, and most popular.
John Lewis “Christmas Advert 2011”

The British retailer is an expert at sentimental hokum, especially at Christmas time, and every year we lap it up and get all verklempt despite ourselves. For its latest spot, it commissioned Slow Moving Millie to cover The Smith’s Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want, setting the song to a sweetly unexpected tale about a boy who can’t wait for Christmas to arrive.
O.B. Tampons “Triple Sorry”

Johnson & Johnson’s popular O.B. tampon brand struggled over the last year with unexplained “production problems” that interrupted supply of the product to stores. So it was great news for J&J that this spot went viral from the moment it was released in early December. Visitors to obtampon.com/apology who enter their names are served up a two-minute video of a hunky guy crooning a personalized over-the-top apology. The spot was a big hit, but it left us feeling a little uneasy, since J&J repeatedly refused to offer any details on the manufacturing issues. And while everyone appreciates it when someone says sorry, would you take back a guy who doesn’t actually tell you why he’s apologizing in the first place?

Watch the ad: http://www.obtampons.ca/apology