Episode Transcript
Hello, and welcome to episode 39 of coffee with cush. Today we are going to go through the anatomy of the perfect ad campaign. I've wanted to do this podcast for years, pretty much since I saw the ad campaign. Because I think that there are certain things within ad campaigns which just resonate perfectly. And the campaign that we're going to talk about is never say no to Panda, which is an Egyptian ad campaign, which was a series of ads, when loads of awards in fact, so that I give everyone due credit. Let me just give you some of the facts about the campaign. So it was for PanDa cheese, which is a cheese obviously in in Egypt, the Arab Arab, the Arab dairy company, the agency was advantage marketing. The created the creative was elephant, elephant boutique agency and Cara, the director and copywriter was ally ally, you'll find an ally two times.com. and creative director was magic NASA. And the producer was pro sound fuzzy production company was the house. And this campaign wouldn't loads of awards in 2010. It won two Grand Prix finals at the Dubai Lynx International Advertising Festival. It was a silver film line at Cannes International Advertising Festival in June 2010. And a gold for film at Epic Rewards. Awards aside, it's just a great campaign. And what I find interesting with not just this campaign, but all awesome ad campaigns is they all have certain traits. What I want to do today is like dissect them. And what is the anatomy of a perfect ad campaign. So I should also mention that it revived a specific song from Buddy Holly, what's the song called it's called true love. True love waits, Buddy Holly. And in fact, the the Buddy Holly estate wrote a letter to the producers of this campaign thanking them for like reviving that song and reviving interest in in Buddy Holly as well. So it's an Egyptian campaign. It's in Arabic. But I'm pretty sure everybody has seen it. If you haven't seen it, all the links are in the show notes. So all the links to the to the campaign are in the show notes as well as links to the agencies, and the directors and producers of the campaign. So you can click on them. But in case you're too lazy to do that, I'm going to play the video. Now. If you're listening on Spotify, or whatever, then you're going to hear the audio. Obviously, you won't see the video. So I'm going to play the video now. And we'll show maybe one of the ads and maybe we'll show other ones in a little bit. Phase one just you know.
Panda made Alright, so there are three sort of levels of analysis that I want to do for this campaign. The first one is like the macro analysis. Because ultimately, if you're doing an ad campaign, you got metrics, right? You're trying to do something specific. So did it do those things? The second one is like the micro analysis, if you like the anatomy, what are the key structures within the campaign that really worked? And it all revolves around actually one concept, one core core concept of juxtaposition. And then the third one is the macro analysis. I want to sort of talk about very, very specific minut details you probably wouldn't notice. But, you know, I do notice them. And they will add to the experience. So let's start with the macro analysis. Was it successful? Well, there's no published data online sales of panda cheese as a result of this campaign. But you don't have to look very far. Pretty much anyone in the marketing industry knows this campaign. Pretty much anyone who follows YouTube Trends knows this campaign. If you go to YouTube, there are loads of videos around this specific campaign, hundreds of millions of views. So if the objective was awareness, I mean, in achieve that objective, but it would seem impossible to me that it didn't have a direct impact on the sales of packages. Why? Because ultimately as marketers all over really trying to do is get people's attention, right? We're like the middle child just screaming in the corner, trying to make sure people look at as a lesson. And so this ad screams, and people noticed, and loads of people noticed. So it seems almost impossible to me that it wouldn't have had a direct positive impact, not just in the short term, in terms of revenue, but also in the medium and long term, there are certain campaigns that I think will stand the test of time. And this is one of them. Like, even the videos themselves are old. If you look at them, right, look at the computers in one of them, the computer and one of them, which is the office scene. I mean, it's a really old computer, right? So the concept itself will stand the test of time. And that's why personally, I think there's the best ad campaign ever created. And by the way, I have no affiliation to pander, or to the agencies or to the specific people involved. I have no affiliation whatsoever. I first saw this when I was working in Camberley in South England. So I've got no affiliations at all. But I just think that this is the perfect the perfect ad campaign. And one of the reasons is because I think it will stand the test of time. Another reason is that I don't know what the budget was. But it's obviously really, really cost effective. It is easy, none of this is easy, but it's relatively easy to create an epic ad and spend 10s, or hundreds of millions of dollars doing it. I'm thinking like Nike 2008 World Cup ad with Rooney and CR seven, I think figure was in there as well. You know, creating that kind of an ad, you can do that. And they are epic for that moment. But their costs so much. And they don't stand the test of time because they're so technology dependent, that the technology moves on. Right at that time, it was incredible to see these transformations. But actually, now it just looks a bit dated. It's like watching the Matrix movie. When I first saw the Matrix movie in 1999. Those effects were incredible. And now it's just like standard, like really standard stuff. And the technology kind of dates, the content. But this campaign, it is unashamedly old. And the core concept just won't ever change the the beauty of it is so human, that it just won't change. And I think one of the other reasons I love this campaign so much is apart from the fact that it'll stand the test of time, apart from the fact that it obviously wasn't very expensive. I'm not saying it was cheap, because it wasn't. Now ads are cheap. But it wasn't $100 million budget, I'm pretty sure of that. But another reason is, because it's just so simple. It's a really, really simple concept, but insanely human. As we move into like the AI world where AI just does so much for us, and in the short term will basically impact every industry, particularly our industry, particularly marketing, but every single industry, you can think of finding something that is like just human. I think it'd be really difficult for an AI to understand why this campaign is so good. And to recreate something that is that good. That's a challenge for any anyone who's heavily into AI at the moment. Why it's campaign. It really, it just is so simple, that it can only have come from human minds. It's like, it's almost going to be the last bastion and this creativity of humanity is going to be the last bastion of air and like the final step, the final war, I can do the math, they can do the astrology, you can do the science, they can do the medicine, it can even come up with creativity or creative ideas. If you give it enough prompts and with AGI that's going to be even more true. And I think the last stand that humans will have in terms of not war against AI because we all use it i But in our war to understand our value alongside AI, creativity and being able to create innately human experiences. I think that is the last stand. And this is a great testament to that last stand and I really salute ally two times and magic NASA and the whole team for this campaign, which I'm sure it's probably by this stage because it's like 1520 years ago now, probably at this stage is it's probably a heavy, heavy burden to bear for them personally But nonetheless, you know, they've created something beautiful. And I think it's worth dissecting why it's so beautiful. So, at a macro level, it was obviously achieved its goals. So it like the anatomical level of who to deep deconstruct this ad. Why is it so effective? It uses one core concept. And that concept is juxtaposition. juxtaposition is a fancy way of saying placing something next to something. And placing something next to something isn't necessarily difficult. What's difficult is to place two things that are incorrect next to each other. It's very difficult to explain. So let me just go through the specific examples. Though first and foremost, the campaign revolves around the panda the cutest of cuddly animals. I mean, it can't be any cuter unless you had like the I don't remember if you remember the dairy milk novel dairy milk. Caramel, Calabrese caramel adverts with the bunny panda net. Sorry, the the cute bunny. Maybe that's more cute than a panda. But I mean, it's such a cute panda. It's not a big panda. It's in no way intimidating. It's just a panda. And yet, it does the most horrifically aggressive things that you can imagine. Like it just massively overreacts. And that's a juxtaposition because like you wouldn't expect firstly, wouldn't expect a panda to be walking into a room. That's a strange situation by itself. But more importantly than that, the other the bigger juxtaposition is that it does something entirely out of cat out of character for a panda. It is. So that's like an another main juxtaposition. It's really cute. And acts really aggressively. So that that's like a juxtaposition in and of itself. And in every one of the campaigns. It's built around that concept that you have this cute, very cuddly Panda Panda that reacts incredibly aggressively to something that's relatively mundane. What is that relatively mundane thing is somebody's choosing not to eat panda cheese. In itself, it just sounds stupid. When you watch them the video, it makes a lot more sense. The next juxtaposition is with the music. The music's really serene. And the scenes before the Pandora appears, are also really serene. So you've got this really beautiful serene music and a really serene setting. So let's take the example of
what I think is the best of the of the campaign, the hospital scene. So in the hospital scene, you know, the patient wranglers bed is watching TV, it's cool, calm setting, the nurse walks in to bring him a cheese sandwich. And the music's play as soon as he says, No, the music's playing and it's was really calm, serene setting, then suddenly, the Pandora appears. And it goes from like serenity to out and out chaos in all of the items. Right? So in this one, it's like a really sinister type of chaos. Because you know, what's going to happen, you know that because this is like, I think there's a third one in the series. So you know, the panda is going to do something aggressive guys in hospital. So you kind of hoping that it's not too aggressive. Because the guy is in hospital, What's he do? He pushes the TV off the stand and it makes this big crash. And then you're like, Okay, what someone else is gonna happen. What's he gonna do? He's gonna punch the patient, what's gonna happen, and he just pulls down on the patient's drip. And it's so sinister, like it's such a small act but incredibly sinister. So you move from like this perfect serenity to absolute chaos. Another good example of that is the pizza on the pizzeria. Which I think again, it's number four or number five in the series, because by this time, you already know the sequence of events right? So you know, someone comes in and says the PERT the character in the in the pizza one is called Abdelaziz, which is next to mine, it says, we didn't we don't need any more cheese. Because he only brought one pack of cheese. The guy went to the shop bought one pint of cheese, and the panda appears and it goes in Arabic, he says, but I got it wasn't me. It was him. And the panel just looks at him. And again Music playing So you go from this perfectly serene, calm setting, and then he just slaps down on the flower flower goes everywhere. That's not enough. So he takes the source jar and pour sauce everywhere. It just creates chaos. So you've got this beautiful juxtaposition of serenity, followed by chaos. And then you got the second juxtaposition of the fact that this cute panda, creating like, incredibly aggressive scenes. So these juxtapositions are all kind of working together to create this perfect experience. Then you have a third juxtaposition between normality and absurdity. All right. So you have a very normal situation, a birthday party, and you got the birthday party, and there's the singing Happy Birthday, perfectly normal scene. And then suddenly, no one ever questions where this pamphlet comes from, by the way, it just appears. And that in itself is absurd. The Congress standing up, it's absurd. It's just staring. It's absurd. And then it acts in this incredibly aggressive way. So you've got this third juxtaposition of normalcy, and absurdity. Because you've got all these three juxtapositions all working together at the same time. I think that the last of the major juxtapositions are, it's funny and intimidating at the same time. So the ads are humorous, just by the nature, they're really humorous ads. But at the same time, after you've seen the first ad, you know that you know, the play by play, and you know, how the sequence is going to play out, you do have a moment of, oh, God, what's gonna happen next, that just a small moment, like in a horror film, where, you know, she goes down the dark alley by herself. Now God washes what's going to happen next. And that same feeling comes that intimidating feeling comes and like I said, on some of the ads, it's like a really overt, aggressive reaction, as as a result of the intimidation. So in the park, for example, he takes the ball and pops the ball. And that's really overt, or in the supermarket, in that there's two supermarket adverts on the first of the supermarket advert, he takes the whole full trolley and tips over. And then he starts jumping and dancing on top of the trolley. So you've got like really overt aggression, and then you've got all intimidation, as the payoff of the intimidation is really, really aggressive and over. And then the payoff sometimes is more subtle from the intimidation, like in the hospital, same way, it's a much more subtle type of intimidation. So they're probably the four major juxtapositions that happen. There is potentially a fifth one, but it's kind of like, I counted slightly, slightly separately. So whenever we're doing any form of campaign, we're thinking we're doing a hard sell or a soft sell. Is it hard sell like, you know, you must buy this because it does this? Or is it a soft sell, which is like showing a product in a, in a scene or in a setting and the panda campaign is one of the few campaigns I've ever come across that successfully does both. It is both a hard sell and a soft sell. Because you got this cute panda who's essentially selling panda cheese. And you have a tagline and an experience, which is literally never say no to Panda always berry panda always eat panda cheese. And it kind of that in itself is a juxtaposition what you've got kind of both the hard sell and the soft sell at play at the same time. I mean, I actually fully love this campaign. I don't know if I've said that. But yeah, I completely love it. And I have since the first day sorry. There are small things in the campaign that I suspect most people wouldn't pick up on. And they all add to the experience. One of the most important things is that there are three elements of audio happening. So the first is background audio in all of the scenes. There is a background audio sorry and all of the ads in the campaign there's a background audio. The second one is the buddy Holly's arm. And the third one which most people won't notice is silence. The use of silence really adds to the impact. So, the Muse Explain, and then it stops at an incorrect point. It doesn't stop at a natural point in the stump song. And there is a moment of silence. And that moment of silence increases the anticipation. And also somehow increases the intimidation because at the same time as the silence, you always have the staring panda. Firstly, this panda appears out of nowhere, and it's staring. And so those two things combined, like the use of silence is just genius. In every one of the ads, the use of silence is genius. I think one of the other things that I always notice is that, watch the ad again. And look specifically at the pandas faces, there's a couple of things to notice. The first thing is the panda smiles, it is smiling. It's standard faces a smiley face. Again, that creates a separate juxtaposition, right? Because it's not just a panda. It's not just a cute fluffy panda. It's a cute, fluffy, happy panda that acts this way. And that all adds to that like cute and aggressive juxtaposition that I was talking about before. Look, again, at the advert whenever the camera is full face into the panda. It blinks. It does. The panda itself blinks. And that's such a small detail. But that kind of humanizes it, it's you know, it would have been easy for this to come across as really kitsch. Like it's a, like a robot panda or something like that. And it doesn't, it's obviously you know, it kind of humanizes that or it makes it feel more real, just the small blinks of an eye of a panda just makes it feel just that little bit more real. One of the other details that I love is how they try and create all of the scenes in single takes, like it would have been easier to do this by cutting at different points. But and using different equipment. So there's two good examples of that. The first one is the pizza scene, right where he slaps down onto the flower. Now, you could close up at that point, you could have zoomed right into that. And then it would have been easier to get the whole flower exploding effect. And you wouldn't have to do so many takes, alright. But they obviously didn't. They obviously obviously set it up, whereby and God knows how many takes it took because they must have had so much cleanup to do on that scene where he slaps down on the table, and flour goes everywhere. And so
by doing that, it just just gives such so much more of a natural feel to the entire campaign experience. And another example of that is the first supermarket scene where he decided, you know, that Panda tipped the trolley over, look at the panelists feet when he tips the trolley over. Because again, it's a trolley, right, you could have had a stage trolley, you could have had a little block next to the trolley, so that when he turns it over, he just has some resistance to be able to turn it over, you could have had fake shopping in the trolley, you could have done anything to make it easier for the panda to tip the trolley over in terms of production or in post production, you could have made that much easier. But then they made it as real as possible. He puts his foot in front of the front wheel to give him leverage. And he takes the trolley over that tiny detail just gives like, again, it kind of humanizes the panda is like, okay, there's a real thing. He that's how a human in that scenario would take over a trolley. Such a minut detail, but like, really impactful I think. And then the third one, which is in the in the second supermarket ad where the child says, Okay, we get this. And obviously, you know, the panda appears. And the dad knows what's about to happen. So it's given them and then panda is still there. And he does fine, give me another takes another and walks away. And then the panda just he doesn't walk backwards. He twists. He like pivots to the side. And they walk past the panda. Again, such a subtle little thing. But it's almost like the pander only appears as your blocker when you make dumb decisions like not buying panda. I absolutely love this campaign. I think it will continue to stand the test of time. There are lots of really good examples of ads that use juxtaposition in this way. Dollar Shave Club's original advert is one that you know, if you go back and find that that basically made them famous. It was like one of the first Youtube viral adds, I think they sold the company to Unilever or someone, a big pharmaceutical for for a lot of money. And a lot of their acquisition was based on the ad. There is another one by in Sudan that happened by Kindle solutions for a tea called massage, which again, uses that juxtaposition that the chaos and calm juxtaposition, and also the serenity and of the music, and also the use of silence, it uses those three as well. And but this campaign uses all of them. It was cost effective, it delivered on its promise. And yeah, I think in 50 years time, people will still talk about this campaign, they won't be talking about this podcast, but we'll definitely be talking about this campaign. And the entire team, like, Should bask in the glory of that I'm sure they have at the time, and I'm sure now it's probably more like, Okay, I've moved past that. Also, if you go to ally, Ally, Ally, two times.com. If you go to his portfolio, you'll see that he's just done incredible work after that after that campaign, too. So these guys have all and all the agencies have done some incredible work after that. And then my final thought on this is just congratulations to Arab dairy. The client, if you like, a lot of times as an agency, you'd go to a client with an out there idea, and they want to play it safe. And our dairy took the risk to go with this campaign, because it was a risk. There's no doubt about it. This is not a standard normal campaign, right. So they, they took the risk to do this. And that takes guts from a client. So bravo to them, they did like a, they did a great job in terms of just accepting the risk of this campaign. I hope you love it too. All the links to the campaign. And the people that I mentioned, the companies are in the are in the show notes. Or if you're listening to a clip, there'll be in the clip notes, too. And I've got actually a few questions from the audience that I never normally get around to doing. But I've got a few minutes this time. So I'm gonna see if there any questions worthwhile. So, Sarah, from a creative agency, Sarah Thompson from a creative agency, she specifically asked about, how do you go about selecting the right music for your campaign? Well, that's such a broad question. It really depends on the overall campaign and what you're trying to do. If you want to choose the right music, the easiest way to do that now is to look at how Tik Tok creators are choosing their music, right? Because they've almost perfected this art of choosing the music and the key is to find something to find content that doesn't directly go with your storyline, you want something that's a little bit offbeat from the storyline, if we're creating just a pure play, and you would want the beat and the storyline to be in sync, right. But if you want your ad to be memorable, you want it can't be completely opposite, but it needs to be slightly off sync. So the massage advert that I was talking about before, I'm gonna put the link to that in here as well. It uses Vivaldi. Classic classical music, classical music. I don't know which one specifically Bhagavad. And it it plays that in a scene of absolute chaos. So even though it's in slumbers and super Slomo, but it's absolute chaos, and it kind of goes perfectly, but it's entirely the wrong music for the scene. So selecting the right scene, sorry, selecting the music that is slightly off beat with the scene, I think is always really helpful. So we're gonna do one more. Ayesha Patel asks, specifically about this advert, considering the cultural context of Egypt, how did the campaign resonate with the local audience? So that's a really good question. I wouldn't have been able to answer this question. If I did this podcast last year, because I live in Egypt. I do live in Egypt now. So or at least I'm here quite often, so I can't answer that. And so before we were doing this podcast, I asked a group of people in the room like born in the 2000s, whether they'd heard of this campaign, they all have, they've all heard of the campaign. They'll know the campaign, they can basically recite the campaign by heart. They're really proud of it. One of the things that I think is really interesting about Egypt is just the pure level of creative expertise that are here. I honestly think that Egypt is, is on par, if not better with them. The best advertising countries in the world. The agencies here are just extraordinary. And I've always kind of known that but from afar as opposed to close. So from afar whenever I traveled, and I was flicking blue tiles if I saw the Egyptians home, I'd wait for the adverts not to watch any of the TV shows just to see the Egyptian adverts. Now I live here, I get to see them all the time. And they're just, it's just a different level. It's just a different level. So, to an extent, yeah, it's still very memorable here in Egypt. But to another extent, ads in Egypt are of such high quality, that it almost I don't want to say it fades into the mass of awesome, but it kind of does. Because you know, every week there's a new campaign out here and they just do it so well. I don't have any questions. Jim, you got any questions? Now? No questions from a slump. So that was episode 39. If you could join us for the next episode. In the next series of episodes we're going to explore in the psychology, sort of psychological tricks, psychological things that happen within marketing. So we're going to sort of dissect certain psychological expert elements of marketing in the mountain mix. Probably we'll do it over like three or four different podcasts as opposed to all in one. Otherwise I'd have to talk for a long time. Thank you. As always for listening to Coffee with cush. Make sure that you follow us wherever you listen to us share, give us your thoughts, you can contact us at contact at cush dot digital, and if you have any ideas for future podcasts, or if there's any specific questions that you want us to answer, don't hesitate. Just drop us an email and we'll cover it off
