Peter York on ads
Cute little bunnies help Sony to show the market its true colours
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Your support makes all the difference.Whenever anything goes wrong anywhere, we know what's to blame. It's always the same crew. First there's globalisation – the pressure of massive worldwide consolidation and homogenisation. Global stuff is pushing away at everything you do.
The other equal-but-opposite trend is fragmentation. All the familiar big national institutions and habits are shot to high heaven by hugely increased choice. And then, enabling all this globalisation and fragmentation – all this ostensible choice – there's new technology. Digital everything. Mobile everything. BlackBerry world. Email as you go, never off.
If you add in the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse, competition, you can explain anything happening on land or sea to companies and institutions and markets anywhere.
Great global forces explain the ads for the colour system called Sony Bravia. Sony is a Japanese global giant that needs to defend its price premium, so it needs global ideas to highlight the brilliant colour of the brand. Vivid metaphors with no baggage.
Advertising veterans believe that the combination of globalisation – bland homogenised approaches – and new technology – leading to tricky computer-generated effects-based advertising – marks the end of everything interesting in UK advertising. But even they tend to give the Sony Bravia commercials the benefit of the doubt.
They look lovely, they have convincing production values and cleverly chosen music tracks. The first showed millions of brightly coloured balls bouncing down those steep San Francisco streets, creating a pixelated world.
The next had a grim Worker Housing collection of tower blocks bursting to life with huge eruptions of brightly coloured paints.
The new commercial shows New York overtaken by plasticine rabbits – more primary colours. Using the old stop-motion animation approach, the rabbits fall out of rainwater pipes and fire hydrants in vernacular New York and congregate in public places, morphing into slabs of nougat Rubik's Cubes all to the 1960s sound of The Rolling Stone's "She's A Rainbow" track.
It draws on contemporary art and clever stuff in video installations. Women and children love the bunnies, art directors love the other effects, and the whole thing is bound to be garlanded with ad-land prizes.
But you can't help remembering when Sony thought the best way to sell the Sony brand to the British was to have UK-only ads fronted by John Cleese.
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