If It’s Great Creative Why Does It Look So Gross?

Posted Jul 28 in Work tagged , , , , ,

UPDATE: In 10 days the campaign has had 450,000 views, and the KPI’s set (measured by samples requested) have been exceeded.

 

This, believe it or not, is one of the pieces of Naked Communications work I’m rather proud of. It is absolutely disgusting, and I still really can’t watch the whole thing, so be careul if you choose to watch it.  It is however, doing really well.

I remember once having an argument with a ‘creative’ who worked at Naked (briefly). He wanted to make this particular piece of creative we were working on look ‘beautiful’. I said it didn’t matter (to the client or the consumer). He said it mattered to him.  I argued that I would happily deliver a poo if it solved the clients problem effectively and efficiently. He said he didn’t want to work in that kind of agency and left.

To me this piece of work ‘Oxy: Man Sized Problems’, challenges creative thinking like my ex-collegue.  It challenges it in two ways; a) creative doesn’t have to be pretty, and b) creative doesn’t need to be made by creatives. Here’s a Tweet from @adamclyne that sums it up beautifully:

There are many strong strategic reasons why this piece of work is ‘right’, and it’s probably best summed up by here by Will Burns from Forbes in his article ‘When Disgusting is Good Strategy’. Tim Burrow’s also called it out positively here, in his piece ‘Spot on Strategy’.

It’s also been called ‘The Grossest Ad I’ve Ever Seen‘, whilst Channel 9 News referes to it as ‘The Most Disgusting Ad Ever’.

It’s only been up a few days but so far so good, and exceeding expectations.  There is a lot in this

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Comments

  1. Richard Sparks

    Aug 10th, 2012

    that was one of the most disgusting things I have seen in a while…but I do have to admit I can see why it would be very successful! well done.

  2. Xavier

    Aug 29th, 2012

    This commercial is the 2G1C of the advertising world…may be you have to incite people to film them each other when discovering this video to launch a meme !

  3. Jeremy Gavin

    Sep 8th, 2012

    That ad reminds me of my pizza faced teen days. I’ve been pondering what creativity actually is in a practical context. For a while now, my opinion has been that creativity just a novel and effective solution to a problem.

    I would be interested to know what you think of that definition Adam.

  4. Adam Ferrier

    Sep 20th, 2012

    Hi Jeremy I agree entirely.

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