Ad Break#13 Food freedom, Unlimited everything and chicken town

Deliveroo- “Food freedom”

One noticeable trend in the past couple of years has been the increase in adverts for online services showing on mainstream television. You wouldn’t necessarily think people who buy lots online would even be watching scheduled tv but presumably they are. Till recently, Deliveroo have been mainly visible in the form of daring bikers who weave though the tiniest possible gap between pedestrians in an attempt to deliver pizza while its still vaguely warm. This year though has seen them launch their global Food Freedom campaign. Intended to show the flexibility that comes from using the company, the two ads seen in the UK so far are from the Wieden+Kennedy London company. The promotional material says "Nothing really beats tucking into a burger in your joggers in front of the TV.  Using a hyperbolic lens, we placed a bunch of simple takeaway truths at the heart of the campaign, showing that, with the ease of Deliveroo, nothing can get in the way of your food”.   Emily Kraftman, Deliveroo’s UK and Ireland marketing director, added:  "Life is too short for disappointing takeaways. At its core, our new campaign is telling people Deliveroo can give you the freedom to have what you want, when you want it, where you want it.". 

So we see various short heightened reality scenes featuring bold colours aplenty. The scenarios are exaggerated with a table flipping over when someone tries to “nick a chip”, a girl pouring various liquids into a container while horror movie style effects play around her.  Other quirky examples include someone having the same meal every Saturday night as the view from his window and his hair both become increasingly futuristic, a prisoner emerging from a hole on the other side of a fence just to pick up food, a woman driving a car from which paper money is flying out of a case or a family caught in a hurricane. Wisely a caption does appear that says there are some limitations which is just as well as we even see a sushi delivery to the Moon. The tone is light and zippy emphasising the speed and accuracy of deliveries and backed by a 2009 track called “Nigeria What?” by DeBruit, But what we really want to know is whether the food is hot!

 

Virgin Media- “I can fly…”

Sometimes adverts can get away with cheeky pay offs that might be considered bad taste in another situation and the latest Virgin Media ad is a good example. Once again VM are pushing a product that is faster and better than the previously advertised faster and better products. By now you’d imagine their internet access can find things as soon as you think of them rather than waiting for you to tap into Google while simultaneously streaming a hundred things at once. Anyway in this witty ad a father feels empowered upon discovering just what VM’s new `creative platform` which combines home broadband, TV and mobile data with Truly Unlimited SIM offers him. Understandably perhaps this makes him believe he can do anything.

“I can download!” he shouts before being covered in static because that is literally what happens when you download. He then realises he can work out of the office having meetings in his motor home. Next he briefly turns into a video game character before realising “I can meme, I can stream, I can fly….” Cue his van shooting of the end of a cliff. Then it cuts to a vicar saying “While he was not able to fly, it is clear he could do everything else- at a very reasonable price”. So, he was killed in the van that’s what they’re saying!. Now that is darkly amusing and works especially as everyone at the funeral is still nodding their heads in time to the soundtrack music.

Directed by Ian Pons Jewell with Academy, the ads are scheduled for three months from mid June. The music in the background is a re mixed extract from the  well- known 1985 Yello track ‘Oh Yeah’ which features in many an 80s film. 

KFC- “There’s only one Colonel in Chicken Town”

When companies reference rivals it is usually for price comparison purposes but its rarer for them to take on imitators in this way. KFC’s latest ad ,produced by the Mother agency and directed by Sam Pilling, takes aim at the large number of fried chicken outfits who take inspiration for their name, livery and product from KFC and let’s face it every city has a lot of these. In Liverpool we even once had Krunchy Fried Chicken with a very similar logo and colours to KFC.  So this is no invented scenario but an exaggerated version of real life. The ad sees a big shiny car driving slowly around the KFC imitators while a laconic voiceover concludes “good luck to them I guess” reassuring us that in Chicken Town there is only one Colonel. In the background the Godfather film theme plays!

KFC endeared themselves to customers last year when during a shortage of chicken in their stores they posted an apology that included an empty bucket with their trademark initials rearranged to say "FCK".  This ad strikes a similarly knowing tone, the idea being that KFC are not really that worried about the imitators and are so successful that the Colonel seems to have nothing better to do than be driven round in a big car. There’s even a billboard ad version with multiple shop hoardings for each letter of the alphabet save for K- AFC, BFC etc!

“It’s flattering to have this entire legion of imitators, and we wish every chicken shop out there the best of luck,” says Meghan Farren, CMO of KFC U.K. and Ireland. “But there’s nowhere else you can get the Colonel’s Original Recipe. We invest time, effort and skill into freshly hand-breading Kentucky Fried Chicken in our kitchens—all day, every day.” A chicken said; “True that.”