What Makes a Good Advert

For this project I thought it was important to look at the topic of what makes a good advert. In '100 Greatest TV Ads' by Mark Robinson, the best advert (as voted by TV viewers) was declared 'Surfer' by Guinness. The advert was made in 1999 by Tom Carty and Walter Campbell of the ad agency Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO. It shows a group of surfers waiting for and surfing the perfect wave, the waves include several white horses galloping and jumping along with it. Carty stated that "We worked out that it took 120 seconds to pour a pint of Guinness and then wait for it to settle." They combined this observance with an old tag line for Guinness: "Guinness is good for you", and created the line: "Good things come to those who wait." Carty and Campbell had worked on a previous advert for Guinness that included swimmers and, according to Robinson, they wanted to film something else in water and so developed the idea of showing the viewer a comparison of waiting for a perfect wave and waiting for a pint of Guinness. [1]

I personally thought this advert was really good, I particularly like the way it opened with a really long shot of the mans face looking in slightly different directions. It really draws the viewer in almost instantly as you want to find out what he's looking at, this combined with the increasing intensity of the music makes it really compelling to watch. The shots of the horses and the sudden audio of loud crashes makes the scene unfolding even more dramatic and almost impossible to take your eyes away from as the viewer wants to know what happens to the surfers. The music ends suddenly when the shot of the surfer celebrating freezes, the advert goes on to show other shots of the surfers celebrating which all use this freeze frame technique. I personally didn't like this part as I felt it didn't fit with the video and felt like a editing mistake, I think if they replaced these shots for the same ones but slowed down slightly it would have looked better and had been a better end to the video.

I don't think I can directly take much inspiration from this advert as its for a completely different product and has a different tone than how I want my final video to have. However, I can draw inspiration from how they developed their idea and the techniques they use to draw the viewer into the video.

[1] - Robinson, M. (2000). The Sunday Times 100 greatest TV ads. London: HarperCollins, pp.135 - 141.