Hasta La Creative!

Sick of your significant other skipping ahead and watching your favorite streaming shows without you? Lock them into a faithful TV-viewing relationship with a high-tech pair of series commitment rings, thanks to U.K. ice cream brand Cornetto. 

The marketer, which tends to advertise around themes of teen love, created special rings that connect to streaming apps, and use near field communications to block access to TV shows you both watch unless your partner is nearby—thus putting an end to sneaking around with services like Netflix while feigning fidelity. 

read more

Unilever ice cream brand Cornetto is continuing its habit of telling cute long-form love stories, but now it’s trying to tell one from both sides at the same time.

The video below offers interweaving perspectives of a nascent teenage romance that’s on the verge of realization—delineating between internal monologue and external dialogue by tricking out the audio (it’s a binaural recording, captured by two microphones to create a 3-D sensation—headphones are recommended) and encouraging viewers to switch between the first-person views of the female and male leads, to see through their eyes.

It’s an intriguing approach that’s a little tricky to follow at times—switching back and forth gets a little tedious. (It’s also not nearly as seamless as what Wieden + Kennedy did with Honda’s “The Other Side.”) It might be smoother to have the camera just switch back and forth between perspectives on its own—effectively what it did, to some degree, in the brand’s Turkish hit from a couple years back.

And the wind-up could probably be a little shorter. Ultimately, it’s high-school prom drama, which is inherently pretty boring to everyone except the high-schoolers experiencing it. (The librarian’s side-eye during all the handwringing pretty much sums up the right way to feel about it—and ultimately, it turns out she’s a narrator of sorts.)

Then again, since high-schoolers are Cornetto’s target, the outsized significance may be perfect. And even you olds might find yourselves invested in the story—if these dumb kids could just get it together, they’d realize they’re more on the same page than they think. By the time the guy works up the courage to ask out his best friend—who’s interested in him, too—it’s actually quite satisfying, complete with him delivering a feel-good, gawky, geeky dance, and her serving him looks that kaleidoscope among perplexed, thrilled, embarrassed, dubious and thrilled again.

In other words, given it’s just an elaborate ploy to sell frozen treats, it’s a pretty sweet thing.

CREDITS
Client: Cornetto
Agency: MOFILM and A Taste of Space
Creative Director: Lorie Jo Trainer Buckingham
Creative Team: James Copeman, Lorie Jo Trainor Buckingham Ben and max ringham
Customer Relations Team: Rebecca Sykes
Strategic Planning: Rebecca Sykes and Lorie Jo trainor Buckingham
Agency Productor: Rebecca Sykes and Rosalind Wynn
Production Company: ATOS

You might want to grab a snack and get comfortable, because Cornetto's newest ad is an eight-minute short film that is totally worth the watch. As with its other long-form ads, the ice cream brand takes a back seat to a bigger story. In this case, it's a love story.

Between the storyline, the style and Lily Allen's narration and cameo, it feels a bit like a softer and sweeter Judd Apatow movie, and I kept waiting for a Zooey Deschanel appearance. Directed by Lloyd Lee Choi for the U.K. market, the spot is clever and cute and funny, and as an avid fan of the Internet, I particularly enjoyed the part when the story's heroine meets brief fame and gets turned into a meme.

I don't want to give the whole thing away—you'll want to watch it for yourself.

Oh right, it also sells ice cream. Some may argue the product being an afterthought makes for bad advertising, but I think there's something to be said for its entertainment value and the consumer connection. Cornetto has done this before with a romantic three-minute video that's been viewed over 30 million times, and also with a cheesy-but-cute-but-confusing spot last month.

It's also just one spot in Cornetto's "Cupidity" series in the U.K. Others include a film about finding love on a road trip; one where a girl declares, "Everything is ugly beautiful"; and a remake of last month's aforementioned confusing video, minus the techno music. It's heavy on the hipster (Instagram photos, flowers in the hair, I'm sure there's a Pabst Blue Ribbon in there somewhere), but totally cute and appealing to what is likely Cornetto's target—millennials and TwoKays (born after 2000), which is apparently what we're calling the generation after millennials.

For the next video in the "Cupidity" series, I'm hopeful for a story about an underdog competing in a rap battle in Brooklyn.

Other spots from the "Cupidity" campaign:

You've seen most of the big viral ads of the year, but not this one—because it was made for the Turkish market by Unilever's Cornetto ice cream brand. It's a short film about a fateful teenage romance, set to a track by Turkish pop singer Yal?n. It's gotten more than 26 million views on YouTube since April, which is pretty incredible, given the market. Notably, though, the spot doesn't even feature ice cream—it's simply presented by Cornetto.

The brand did some similar films in the U.K. this year; the Turkish work was the pilot program. Ben Curtis, senior brand development manager for Cornetto, told Marketing Week: "The short films allow us to take more time to develop a deeper connection with teenagers in a way that we can't in a 30-second spot. Also we know that our teens are always online, and are so creative."