Liam Neeson And Lost Dogs: 5 Ads You Should Watch Right Now
Snickers reboots The Brady Bunch, Lionel Messi gets stuck in a box and a cute dog gets lost.
Sound bizarre? Well, it’s just another week in AdLand.
Here’s the five best ads Unruly have been mulling over this week.
Enjoy!
5. Snickers – The Brady Bunch
Even if you’re not American, don’t care about sports and are currently subletting a studio space under a rock, there was no avoiding the Super Bowl this week. Especially in AdLand, where Super Bowl Sunday is something akin to Christmas, Black Friday and the Second Coming rolled into one.
Snickers attracted a lot of pre-game intrigue with their frankly baffling teaser and the full spot matched expectations for weirdness. An odd cocktail of 70’s nostalgia, character actors and ‘Too Many Cooks’, ‘The Brady Brunch’ shows there’s room for the surreal on game day.
4. Supercell – Clash of Clans: Revenge
Amid the roll call of high profile trailers for Fast & Furious 7, Terminator Genisys and other explosion outlets, games developer Supercell snuck a little Hollywood tribute of their own into the Super Bowl proceedings.
While its unclear whether action franchise ‘Taken’ will have a fourth entry, the ‘Clash of Clans’ producers have gifted us the next best thing. Their minute-long spot takes Liam Neeson out his life-and-death situations and drops him into something a little more pedestrian: playing an iPhone game in a coffee shop. Rest assured, he handles both with equal gravitas.
3. Gillette – El Cubo
Not unlike the futuristic horror maze from 1998’s cult classic ‘Cube’, Gillette’s ‘El Cubo’ is a pretty serious bit of tech. Unlike the futuristic horror maze from 1998’s cult classic ‘Cube’ however, Gillette’s ‘El Cubo’ contains Barcelona FC’s Lionel Messi. Look, it’s not a competition, guys.
In one of the most roundabout endorsements in the history of shaving advertising, Messi puts his celebrated quality of ‘having a head’ to good use by sticking it inside a perspex box. A bunch of sinister boffins proceed to harangue Leo with various hazards, including extreme heat, gale-force winds and a bit of turf banging him in the head repeatedly. I’m not sure what the moral is, but Messi sure does look relieved to be out of that box.
2. Reebok – Freak Show
Moving onto an athletic advert that feels genuinely athletic, Reebok’s ‘Freak Show’ is a rallying cry for the gym rats, yoga nuts and marathon chatters living quietly amongst us. Over a stirring montage of men and women pushing themselves to the limits of physical exertion, the voiceover asks “Are we weirdos?”. The answer: potentially, but you’ll definitely live longer than the rest of us.
The ironic title ‘Freak Show’ is worn proudly on its sleeve, taking another step in Reebok’s gritty rebrand. Almost as bracing as actually going for a run yourself, nothing you’ll see this week will make you want to flip tires in your garden more.
1. Budweiser – Lost Dog
A Super Bowl round-up wouldn’t be complete without the daddy of them all. That’s right, it’s the ubiquitous, lovingly-predictable, 100% red-blooded American spot from Budweiser. And this year, they’ve made it about a cute relationship with an animal. Go figure.
Winning the Super Bowl ad race for the third year running, the beer brand have become so good at making people watch these spots that I wouldn’t be surprised if Anheuser-Busch CEO Carlos Brito made a last-minute presidential bid in 2016. He’s not even American – that’s just how good they are.
With that, we wave goodbye to Super Bowl ad season for another year – here’s hoping we’ve figured out how American Football works by next February.
