Reel Opinion: Ben Mooge

This month’s Reel Opinion comes from Ben Mooge, Creative Partner at start-up agency Work Club. The format should be familiar by now, as the former Mother Creative Director gives us his view on five ads that caught our attention over the past few weeks. Enjoy.

Ben Mooge
Creative Partner
Work Club

McDonald's 'Planting'

Agency: Leo Burnett / London

Production: Academy / London

Director: Tony Barry

A hoard of messy, well-cast children, under Tom and Barbara style adult supervision, grow organic flowers like the ingredients in McDonald's’ Happy Meals. It’s all honest, well shot and observed, and not a million miles away from the Persil 'Dirt Is Good' work. But that’s my slight problem with it. Are they avoiding the issue? Surely a burger is a wonderful, guilty excuse. A burger for burger’s sake. Burger porn in a time of deli sandwiches. I miss Mayor McCheese. That really was a Happy Meal.

Comfort 'Naturists'

Agency: Ogilvy / London

Production: Thomas Thomas / London

Director: Jim Gilchrist

A naturist with fully-clothed wife in marriage guidance. In the wrong hands, this could easily be dreadful. It’s not. There’s a few nice touches in it; the headband; the groin injury; the line 'Is this the kind of stuff you bring into our house?' Could it be funnier? Sure. Is this better than the usual fabric softener ad inflicted on the public? Absolutely.

NSPCC 'Hands'

Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi / London

Production: Nexus / London

Director: Carolina Melis

Silhouette hands guide a picture book boy through a picture book landscape. And it is rather lovely animation, it really is. But I suspect it may be easier to remain apathetic to child abuse when everything is only shown as lovely. There’s always a case for abandoning out and out shock tactics but I just wonder whether this has gone too far the other way. Like the ‘Weapons of Love’ line, though.

Converse 'My Drive-Thru'

Agency: Anomaly / New York

Production: Psyop / New York

Director: Marie Hyon / Marco Spier

Converse and Rock n Roll. That’s quite a good brand fit, then. Given that Kurt Cobain blew his brains out in the product, and that no-one needs to know anything else about a pair of shoes that everyone owns at least 5 pairs of; probably not a bad idea to focus on the rock and the roll. And they’re giving something back to their audience, good for them. Nice lo-fi handmade-effect video that was probably really expensive. Just a bit of a shame that the tune sounds like it came straight out of Prince’s big purple recycling bin. Mind you, Prince could probably do with going back there himself.

Vodacom 'We Are Having It'

Agency: Draft FCB / Johannesburg

Production: Velocity Films / Cape Town

Director: Adrian De Sa Garces

African Military Dictator comedy from Vodacom. Uniformed leader denies the effect that this propaganda has on him, as he always gets what he wants anyway. Hopefully this is a typical/topical South African / Zimbabwean joke, because it’s not normally a rich seam of humour. Maybe you just had to be there. Or not.

NewsReel 08.08.08

Velocity and Ogilvy dominate in Margate
The definitive advertising awards festival for the Middle East and Africa took place between the 25th and 28th July in Margate, SA.

The big winner of the night was Velocity and Ogilvy’s ‘Beautiful’ spot for Allan Gray. The Grand Prix win at the 30th annual Loerie Awards follows a well-deserved Silver at Cannes for the touching and humorous monochrome spot. Velocity went home with a clutch of awards, including five golds, five silvers, three bronzes and five craft certificates. Executive Producer Peter Carr, who must have been ruing the fact that he left the wheel barrow at home, had this to say, ‘This past year we've succeeded in getting our hands on the best work in South Africa and turning the scripts into award-winning pieces. It's a good feeling to have won eighteen awards and a great feeling to again win the Grand Prix at South Africa's biggest ad festival.’

Ogilvy went home happy too - announced overall winner with a total of 47 awards. That massive haul of awards for both companies deserves some plaudits and what better way than to show off their finest piece below. For a full list of winners click here.

Don't have a heart attack
Following on from the undoubted success of Honda’s recent ad-vent, 4Creative are working with the British Heart Foundation to give the whole of the UK a heart attack – or at least a sense of what it’s like to have one. Quite how Grey London and director Brett Foraker are going to achieve this feat is unclear as the project is shrouded in secrecy. However Jon Williams, Chief Creative Officer at Grey, did have this to say of the project, ‘We did a lot of research and halfway through one of the sessions, someone said what we need is to give everyone in England a heart attack. It was as simple as that.’ Trailers have been running throughout the week, supported by public figures including Chris Tarrant and David Cameron.

The ad will only be aired on TV once – at 9.17pm this Sunday 10th August during ‘The Midsomer Murders’. There can be no doubting the suitability of the spot given your typical ‘Midsomer’ viewer, and it’ll be interesting to see if there’s a spike in 999 calls as hypochondriacs everywhere take their inspiration from the ad.

Addictive are addictive
Reel favourites Addictive TV will be performing a huge outdoor show by the Thames on 22nd August, the weekend of the official Olympics hand-over ceremony from Beijing to London. Their set will open with Sportive, the video they created for adidas that’s been touring Chinese cities with the ‘Sport in Art’ exhibition.

Addictive has also secured a major coup undertaking a project with the Austrian state broadcaster ORF. They will remix the channel’s coverage of the Olympics live in their studios as part of their interactive services on 16th and 17th August.

In honour of this innovative event, we managed to catch up with those clever folk at Addictive and get a few words straight from the horses mouth:

Can you explain the ORF television project and how you became involved? Where will it take place?

It’s an interactive experiment in live broadcast and image manipulation - it's simply boldly going where no live TV has gone before! We became involved through a German professor of technology at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences, who’s heading up the project. He came to one of gigs in Germany about 3 years ago, and approached us afterwards asking for our involvement. He loved our work and subsequently came to all our gigs in Germany!! It takes place at in Vienna, in the studios and transmission suites at broadcaster ORF.


What elements of the Olympics will you be remixing?

The intention is to be remixing different sports that we know will be sent down the feeds on the two days that we're doing it - this includes weightlifting, boxing, beach volleyball, sailing, athletics, tennis and table-tennis. We have an idea of what’s scheduled for specific times, but it’s flexible in terms of what we’ll choose and we’ll focus on the live sports coverage itself, capturing it, cutting live loops, scratching it, mixing it with archive footage we’ve cut into audio/visual rhythmic bedding tracks of those sports - e.g. breakbeat loops made from table tennis, and so on. I guess if the feeds include crowd shots and all the usual incidental cut-aways involved in live coverage we'll be using that too. That's the plan, but it's an experiment and it's live - so things might change a bit on the day!


Mixing footage and music live is obviously what you guys are best known for - but how are you feeling about doing it live for TV?

Live performing is only part of what we do - equally we produce remixes for virals, broadcast commercials and so on. Actually, in the last couple of years we've become quite well known for remixing movies for a number of the Hollywood studios, we recently remixed Iron Man for Paramount for use as a viral, reaching blogs, feeds and general parts of the web traditional trailers can't reach. And with this live Olympics remix, I think it's a ground-breaking project to be part of and we're keen to entertain and push the envelope, whatever the medium. There’ll hopefully be audience feedback via interactive messages, so we won't be totally isolated, but obviously it's a long way from working with a live crowd, and the kind of instantaneous response we're used to. In some respects TV gallery directors already do live mixing, but we're taking that one step further and remixing, being more experimental and playing with the images in ways they wouldn't normally.