The pink unicorn in the room


The hottest thing on the advertising circuit at the moment is this campaign for Lacoste X Save Our Species, the Lacoste/International Union for the Conservation of Nature collab, created by BETC. Whoever thought of this brilliant collaboration to bring the tennis brand positioning out of the collars-turned-up-in-the-country club space to young, fresh and woke, is a genius.


Above, an illustration of the brand repositioning.
Clearly, A+ for execution. I am considering buying a polo shirt for the first time since the nineties, and I find the 150€ price tag reasonable because I like animals, and the little rhinoceros speaks to me (he says "help, there are only 67 of me left!").

I have nothing mean to say about the above campaign, but it does make me think of the exploitation of super cute animals (so, all animals) in advertising. Let's have a little look, and a discussion about the pink unicorn in the room.


NORD DDB created this campaign featuring the doge meme and got a lot of traction in social media, and were even reported to Reklamombudsmannen (RO) for being racist towards Japanese people (due to the origin of the Shiba in connection with the bad grammar) which gave them additional PR. The campaign was finally freed of the allegations. I think the dog is the real star of the ad here but I also find it a bit lazy to take a masterpiece collectively created by "the internet" and lean so heavily on it (see also: Zlatan, Rihanna).


These ads for Pedigree Dentastix were created by BBDO. Seeing as the ads are trying to sell you a healthy snack for dogs, I cannot consider this exploitative. These dogs are trying to get owners to buy snacks that are good for their teeth, and therefore helping all dogs. They are heroes. And because most owners look like their dogs, I think this really works.


According to science, humanoids freak us out because they are not quite human but display human characteristics. That could explain why this Orangina commercial is what nightmares are made of. But also, s/o to Fred&Farid for adding some diversity by using a giraffe, a chameleon, and a goat. 



This Nutri Balance ad crafted by Y&R is truly good-looking, and perhaps a bit too premium-feel for dogfood, but my main objection is the messaging here; I would argue that the owners are the bad one's in the story told here, and it seems petty to blame the dogs. Admittedly there is a lot of storytelling in a single image, and the comedy is pretty solid so again, kudos, Y&R.


Is it really an animal if it is a fictional animal? This unicorn promoting toilet products was dreamt up by Harmon Brothers for Squatty Potty, and it is sort of like you let a four-year-old with a magic wand imagine the perfect commercial. Spot on, though, because we all have an inner child princess fairy, and the video has been shared literally millions of times. 



Sing It Kitty is the kind of ad that makes people think it is always fun to work in advertising. The Doctor Snuggles-level weirdness going on in this video conjures up an image of people in thoughtfully chose, objectively ugly t-shirts smoking pot and laughing loudly as they write the script. The result is that good. I love this cat. I want to hang out with this cat. This cat has the same effect on me as Nick Kroll, and watching Drunk History.

Obviously, there are several situations when animals are appropriate in advertising.
  • If you are marketing an animal-related product
  • If you are telling a story, and your story requires the specific carachteristics of the animal
  • When the animal makes it funny (but as always, make sure your "funny ad" is actually funny)
If the cute kitten is just a placeholder for inspiration, scratch it.

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We are all circus monkeys

The ad has nothing to do with the text below. It is just a good ad by Saatchi&Saatchi Stockholm for Gainomax.

If you are in digital, chances are you are acutely aware of the 3-second rule. If not, this is the gist of it: if your page or content takes more than three seconds to load, more than half of your visitors will have already gone ahead and bounced right out of there. Basically, the general public has the attention span of a poorly disciplined circus monkey.

The interesting thing about this phenomenon is that a few years ago, those three seconds were five, and in the 60s, a TVC was basically as interesting as the tv-show it interrupted. This was obviously due to the lack of choices, a luxury we no longer have. But I imagine that with an ever-diminishing tolerance to wait even the briefest moment before moving on to the next shiny object, at some point, we are going to have to come full circle. Remember when a small cellphone was the coolest thing you could have? Remember that tiny Motorola flip phone that everyone flipped out about?

Copy so good it gives you goosebumps: ad by McCann & Erickson for Motorola.

We all know what happened next - the Blackberry came along, and the iPhone, and now one can hardly tell the difference between the iPad I use to watch film on a train or plane with the CDs fresh new 5,8" screen iPhone X. Full circle. 

As algorithms striving to show us content relevant to us narrows our field of vision, and we spend less time on each item, sharing articles based on clickonomy-optimized headlines, the selection of data we consume faced with a tiny screen giving us access to the corpus of all information is arguably making us more stupid with each swipe. However, there are other tendencies as well - though still reserved pretty much for the educated, white middle class, rich in cultural capital and well off in every other way, commonly referred to as hipsters - the idea of slowing down has brewed (literally) in the last years. The counter-culture to the screen-obsessed era we are living through is ironically well documented on Instagram and consists of pulled pork, growing tomatoes on a Williamsburg balcony and - you guessed it - home-brewed beer. Sustainable is sexy, but there is nothing sustainable about the way we perceive our world - after all, we are doing it through a small screen with a smaller perspective. 

A site should work seamlessly and quickly, the tech is readily available and there is really no excuse for poor content choices and sloppy coding. But I hope, and think, that branded content, moving forward, will change. Although short videos with the messaging promptly shoved in our faces in the first two seconds might serve a purpose, I want to see brands expand on their messaging, whether they want to tell a story, be funny or tell us more about their thoughts on sustainability. 

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