Give that man a Bell’s

Not for the first time my attention is drawn away from the world of marketing technology and the game-changing developments in new digital media to a piece of good old fashioned advertising genius. In this case it is the new ad for Bell’s whisky titled “The Reader”.

It was produced by a local South African agency, King James. I don’t know whether Diageo plan to run it elsewhere in the world but I hope they do. It would work anywhere. But in South Africa it works big time. What do I mean by ‘work’, given I don’t actually know what the brief was? Well let me guess. As with any advertising you want to be famous, you really want to engage people by nailing some aspect of the human condition and link it to your brand. And as with a lot of successful drinks marketing you want to own an occasion – to lock something in people’s minds that means you find a place in their repertoire. When people gather to bond around some moment of achievement – an ordinary moment which is actually quite extraordinary for the people involved – you might think about a Bell’s whisky. I think it is normally called ‘everyday special moments’ in a typical and universal drinks segmentation study. Bell’s have for some time run an ad where the local fly fisherman saves the day for his local pub by using his skill to hook the keys to the pub so that everyone can watch the big footie game.

The line “Give that man a Bell’s” is the pay-off and I hear it used either appreciatively or sarcastically in every day banter. What the fly fisherman ad did was also to establish Bell’s Scottish whisky credentials. But the latest ad takes that special universal moment when a son realizes how proud his dad is of him and nails it to a cultural insight that hits home hard, to what I suspect is the real task of the advertising – to build penetration into the repertoires of upwardly mobile male black drinkers. These are successful or aspiring young men who owe their education to the sacrifice and aspiration of their parents, many of whom would be so under-privileged as to be illiterate. It works for anyone, anywhere – the moment when you realize the pride your parents take in seeing you grasp the opportunities they never had, but worked hard to give you. In post-apartheid South Africa you can dial that poignancy up 1000%.
 
Everything about this ad screams class and craftsmanship. The casting, direction, script, music, pace, acting. It is like that greatest film of all time “Shawshank Redemption” – simply perfect in every regard. Did you spot the line the father reads out from his essay in class “My son and I mowed the grass” – he could have written anything but of course he writes about his son. 

It reminded me of a very famous ad from the 1980s for Yellow Pages featuring an old man, JR Hartley, searching for a lost copy of a book about fly fishing it turns out he wrote. Get people to use Yellow Pages for more than just finding a plumber and see if you can get the older generation to use Yellow Pages at all – I suspect that was the brief. Like the Bell’s ad it went into popular culture and was referenced and parodied – anyone over 40 years in the UK will be able to recall every scene and every line.  

These are incredibly rich and entertaining (in the truest sense of the word therefore effective) stories told in just a minute or so. You are able to watch them and write the backstory, you want to talk about them, you want to see them over and over again – you will stop what you are doing to watch them. That takes writing and direction of the highest order.  

Advertising owes some of its magic to the fact that it is an industry that gave starts to some very famous careers –writers like Salman Rushdie, Joseph Heller, F.Scott Fitzgerald or directors like Scott Ridley, Alan Parker and Nicholas Roeg. When that kind of creative genius collides with the right marketing brief you get an atomic explosion of excellence. In case you want to know, Salman Rushdie coined the line “naughty but nice” to sell cream cakes – and it did, lots of them.

So forget about the new marketing technologies, social media or mobile. Just get back to basics and get smart agencies to hire brilliant creatives to make great ads. 

Well… not so fast. The Bell’s ad has been seen over a million times on Youtube already, will be referenced in many millions more social comments and blogs and it could be delivered to the mobile phone of precisely the right target at - or near - the point of purchase. Back in the 1980s Yellow Pages had to pay for every single viewing of JR Hartley and it got talked about down the pub among a few mates.

Read more from Mark in our Clubhouse.