STUPID/SMART
The Banger Blog · a Stupid/Smart breakdown
Classic · 1981

Fast Paced World

Federal Express · Ally & Gargano

From YouTube.

The insight

Overnight delivery sold the package arriving tomorrow, which is true, dull and easily matched. The real customer is the middle manager drowning in a culture that has accelerated past what a person can process.

The idea

Do not describe the fast-paced world, make the viewer live inside it. Hire the fastest talker alive and let him run the entire thirty seconds at 500-plus words a minute.

The Stupid/Smart of it

Stupid: Handing your whole thirty seconds to an unintelligible motormouth and an ugly-on-purpose office, with no glamour anywhere.

Smart: An ad you can barely follow should fail, until you realise the only thing on screen that can keep up at that speed is the company paying for it.

Why it works

Only the overnight-delivery brand can make 'keeping up with an impossible pace' a literal product demo rather than a metaphor.

The casting is the idea and the performance is the copy, so the proposition is felt in the body, not argued, and nobody forgets the fast man.

The magic

Moschitta's 586-words-a-minute record performance, shot in Sedelmaier's deliberately ugly office so you recognise your own Tuesday instead of admiring a set.

Craft-poweredIt dies when described. It only exists once made. Has to be seen to work.

The way in

The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in:

Show the feeling, not the productMake the proof the entertainment
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