By Malay Desai
From: Wieden + Kennedy, New York
The silver lion winner at Cannes 2013 is a one-minute film celebrating the cook of every home. With a male voiceover’s poetic lines under a dramatic background score, the spot speaks of the cook’s imagination, creativity and the relationship with pots and pans, flavours and more. The visuals are mostly fast-paced, micro close-ups of foods — eggs, syrups, cakes, oils and kitchen tools such as the house match. The film ends with the homemaker spreading some butter over bread and eating while Looking out the window. ‘good food deserves lurpak’, the tagline says.
Why we like ?
While the rest of this magazine has moved on after the Cannes Lions 2013 reportage last week, this column still has a hangover. And why not, the visually stunning ads that make it to and win the Lions every year are (usually!) mini textbooks in film-making. After last week’s campaign where the concept was the winner, here the imagery IS the concept.
The product is butter, and though Lurpak the brand is the Amul of the West (multinational market, over a 110-year legacy), to get down to making an appealing film can be a harrowing task. The idea’s obvious — celebratethe homemaker, i.e. the buyer and user, by making her (or him, for that matter) feel she’s doing something truly special inside that kitchen every day.
The reason for the ad’s silverware is the camerawork and postproduction. Over three-fourths of the film is a fiery montage of foods — swirling eggs, dripping essences, squeezing limes and steamy pancakes. This is a play of visuals that’s both soothing and stunning to your eyes — with its slow-mos, time lapses and real-time motions. The other indulgent element (if it’s a Lions winner, this is one of the certainties) of the film is the voiceover. The poetic copy — ‘in a place of pots and pans and slightly blunt knives’ — gets its due with actor Rutger Hauer, of Blade Runner and Batman Begins fame. How many Indian advertisers use a celebrity only for his/her voice? We can only recall Farhan Akhtar for Ashok Leyland in recent memory.
The only problem we had with the spot, that it doesn’t seem like an ad for butter, has just become thinner as we’ve already watched the spot half a dozen times. For a TV audience, watching this 50 times over some weeks would only be a pleasure. And therein will lie the brand recall. Our cuisine crazy peoples and the plethora of masala/kitchenware/packaged food brands could totally do with a meaty way of filming such as this.
To watch this film, feed this link into your browser: Goo.gl/BXccx
