KEY POINTS:
The Fair Go Ad Awards come up again this Wednesday and I reckon our ad spoofs this year are right up there. I don't mean they're not rankly amateurish - just nowhere near as rankly amateurish as some have been in the past.
How do we decide which TV commercials to send up? The general rule is the worse the ad, the easier to spoof it. Sadly, it's a rule we too often ignore. We just can't resist taking off certain wonderful ads. And that's the case again this year.
The ads need to be well known. There's nothing funny about watching a send-up if you haven't seen the original. But this is becoming more difficult as viewing habits become more disparate. More people are watching a wider range of ads on more and more channels.
In our planning meetings, when we talked about what ads to spoof, one reporter's recommendation hadn't even been seen by the others. I suspect the ad agencies are making fewer of those "mega-ads" that everyone talks about. Like the "bugger" ad.
The spoofs are, by and large, there for the laughs. But this year, there's one that simply puts the boot in. If you lost money or had it frozen by a finance company during the year, well, this one won't make you laugh. But hopefully, you'll like it.
One interesting thing this year about the voting for best and worst is that a lot more people voted for best ad than for worst ad. This is unusual. People tend to have much stronger views about what they don't like.
We usually get far more votes in the worst category. Maybe this year has been notable for ads that appeal rather than ads that drive you nuts. And when I think about it, I agree.
In my view, the best ad series during 2008 was New Zealand Post's with the Opshop song, One Day. I love a soppy ad. Air New Zealand does them well with family greeting loved ones at airports and that sort of thing. Or maybe it's just the appeal of babies.
The New Zealand Post ad, when an embittered father-son relationship ended with the old man turning up to see his grand-child brought a tear every time.
If you're into politics, this year the secondary students invent their own political party and make a TV ad for it. As part of that segment we take a glance through the party political TV ads of the past few decades, before billboards took over.
The element I look forward to most in the Ad Awards is the "tell us how you made it" segment, where the ad agency shows us how it achieved certain effects. This year we ask Vodafone how they turned household effects, and a girlfriend, into two-dimensional pictures that can be folded up and stuck in the back pocket like a cellphone. It will unfold before your eyes.
And there's another segment like this that must remain confidential - the real secret is not revealed until the last second of the shoot. Its originality is a tribute to some of Fair Go's younger creative people and I'm certain it will be one of the highlights of the night. Or, should I say, the least of the lowlights.
- The Fair Go Ad Awards are on TV One, Wednesday at 7.30pm.
