A glass and a half of awesome

I have a new favourite advert. I have a new favourite advert every few months: I can never settle on just one great piece of work to say is my absolute favourite, it really depends on when you ask me. The same goes for music: I still don't know what my favourite song is after 21 years of life and gigabytes upon gigabytes of albums. Perhaps I'm just indecisive, but I prefer to think that I'm open minded and people keep creating new masterpieces every day, and when I discover them they temporarily take the number 1 spot along with a whole host of others.

To get back to the original point of this post, my new favourite advert is for Dairy Milk and features a gorilla playing the drums along to the classic Phil Collins tracks "In the air tonight".

Here's the ad in question:


I think Fallon have created an instant classic that people will remember for many years with this advert. I think it plays very well on the British love of off-the-wall humour and the simple fact that anything can be made exponentially more entertaining by placing a guy in a gorilla suit into human situations - see The Mighty Boosh and Trigger Happy TV for evidence. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure that Bollo the talking gorilla from The Mighty Boosh is also a drummer: this may well be a deliberate link, I'm not sure.

Anyway, the advert is also very attention grabbing, both visually and aurally: the simplicity of the music and the close-up on a gorilla (which isn't obviously a man in a gorilla suit until further into the ad) is very powerful. When I first saw it I missed the opening "a GLASS and a HALF FULL PRODUCTION" which, of course, instantly informs the viewer that this is an advert for dairy milk, with a welcome return of this classic slogan. By missing it I thought that I was watching an advert for an animal abuse charity at first and I was intrigued to see where it was going. Needless to say I absolutely lost it when he (I'm assuming it's a he; I don't know why) started playing the drums. Somehow they've managed to make the gorilla's face gurn perfectly in the same way all drummers (myself included) do, which is a brilliant touch: he really looks like he's feeling the music.

I think one of the main reasons this advert is so good is that it is a refreshing change from the more standard in your face "here's the product, this product is great, did I mention the name of the product? Buy our product, here's the logo, slogan, blah blah blah buy our product!!" school of advertising. It is entertaining, and it mentions the product very briefly. Simple, effective, and I crave a dairy milk every time I see it.

I haven't yet seen any other media from this advertising campaign, but I hope that Fallon have integrated this advert across other platforms - billboards, digital and POS featuring the gorilla would serve as neat reminders of the TV version, get people talking about it and, of course, buying the chocolate bars. I am, in all seriousness, going to buy a big bar of Dairy Milk next time I go to the shop, just to say thanks for this great piece of advertising (honest, that's the real reason, nothing to do with cravings the likes of which have never before been felt by someone who wasn't pregnant).