As expected, there’s been a fair bit of discussion about Lindauer’s new campaign on StopPress, some quite enjoying the gender-based hyperbole, some feeling it’s a little too abstract and/or sexist. We couldn’t get hold of DDB’s managing director Justin Mowday last week for a chat when it launched. But we caught up with him yesterday. So what’s the deal? And what else have they got up their sleeves?
Unsurprisingly, Mowday loves the campaign and says it’s interesting because, unusually, it is unashamedly “for women and comes from a woman’s perspective”. It’s also “unashamedly a collaboration” between Danish director William Stahl (who was behind the music video for the Who Made Who song Every Minute Alone that’s featured in the ad) and the goal was to make something that was more like a music video than a traditional TVC.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_RowU43ncwJust after he started, DDB’s executive creative director Andy Fackrell told us we could probably expect some more visual storytelling to come out of the agency under his watch, something he deemed an essential technique when working on campaigns for global brands that had to be understood across many different international markets and couldn’t rely on language to do it. Mowday thinks this ad fits into that category and, as there’s a fair whack of art in this particular commercial message, he thinks it’s great that some in the industry “are struggling to assess it as an ad”.
Of course, plenty of men quite enjoy some peace and quiet at home when the ladies head out, but, as Mowday says, there is a truth in this ad because, like Homer Simpson being separated from Marge for a day and becoming “as dirty as a Frenchman”, some men are indeed lost at home when their female partners aren’t there—”even if they do know how to use the microwave”. And dramatising insights is what advertising is all about, he says.
“Truths don’t have to be universal to be truths,” he says. “So we have taken it and then exaggerated it to the absolute extreme and then it becomes quite funny,” he says, adding that female viewers of the ad have found the microwave and perfume sniffing scenes the most entertaining.
When the campaign was launched last week we received a packet of ’tissues for men’ as a bit of a PR stunt, and Mowday says there’s more where that came from, with a 3.6 metre high champagne fountain with a digital screen at the top showing a weeping man that will be on display at the 30 days of Fashion and Beauty event.
“It’s like his tears are flowing into the champagne glasses. So they will be able to drink the sorrows of man,” he laughs.
And there’s also a Lindauer microwaveable ‘meal for one’ on the horizon for all those lonely fellas out there, something Mowday hopes will be more than a PR stunt and actually be able to be purchased in supermarkets.
