The Super Bowl XLIV spot. Betty White, and then Abe Vigoda.
Hunger does not make you peckish, it makes you insufferable. Everyone has been the person snapping at a friend over nothing, and everyone has been on the other end of it.
Cast the hunger. If you are not yourself when you are hungry, then show the person you turn into, played by somebody else entirely.
The Stupid/Smart of it
Stupid: Launch a global repositioning for a ninety-year-old brand, on the most expensive airtime in the world, by having an 88-year-old woman tackled into mud. No product benefit. No claim about taste, size or satisfaction.
Smart: For an impulse product, fame is the strategy, and a joke that travels is the cheapest fame there is. The real discipline is the shape: the line is a brief disguised as a slogan, telling every market what to make without telling them what to say.
The steal: do not write a line that describes your product. Write a rule that produces ads.
If your idea cannot generate its own next execution without you, it is a commercial, not a platform, and you will be back in the room in eighteen months. Fifty-six of fifty-eight markets grew share in year one.
Betty White playing football badly in the rain, and the total absence of any explanation. The casting is the copy.
Idea-poweredThe rule outlives every execution built on it. Survives paraphrase.
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: