Commercials Free From Taboos
Creativity seems to be coming into vogue, regardless of whether you have it in your head or in your hair, for which reason the ladies and youths that walked the length of the catwalk in Kyiv’s October Palace sporting bizarre outfits and hairdos surprised no one. Meanwhile, the things streaming from the big screen were at times shocking, funny, and provided food for thought, sometimes exceeding the viewers’ ability to digest information.
Analyzing the information received during this year’s Night of Advertisement Eaters has been made a lot easier thanks to the captions. Nonetheless, one did not need to know a foreign language to split one’s sides over the creations of Syrian advertisers. Their odes to washing powder and fans could be easily win the Advertising of the Pterodactyl Epoch award. In fact, Jean Marie Bursiko (the founder of this show and owner of an extensive collection of commercials, of which he receives 250,000 annually) has his own selection criteria. As a result, the show was overflowing with truly remarkable features and surprises. Consider for example a series of commercials subsumed under the title “Clean Up the Mess.” The idea is no doubt brilliant, yet the form it has taken is quite grim. While the episode in which a careless mother has trouble finding her yelling baby tucked between a linen basket and a refuse bin is quite bearable, the piece in which a couple of passionate lovers is shown tumbling onto a couch, while at the next moment the girl is frozen in her ecstasy with a fork sticking out of her back, is not meant for the fainthearted. This can really teach people not to create a mess.
The viewer is left speechless on seeing the harrowing scenes from the Heaven Can Wait series: a car hits down a pedestrian to the slow count of the braking distance: one foot, two feet, three... Social commercials are meant to make an indelible impression on the audience. However, at times the viewers’ response was strange: they laughed on seeing the message of the Red Cross, “Sorry, there is no peace on Earth. Wars are raging in 36 countries of the world.”
In fact, among the huge number of quality films there were not too many gems. Consider for example those crazy Japanese commercials. What do jumping and blending images have to do with typography? Still it is catchy and memorable, although its name is a real tongue twister: Tahrikamashi. Meanwhile, a Kawasaki commercial features a man showing his appreciation of the motorbike’s performance by means of obscene gestures. Without doubt, the Night of Advertisement Eaters featured many commercials that would be unacceptable on common television channels. “These represent the rare cases when the client has been talked into producing a really high-quality commercial,” one of the guests said after the show. His company agreed readily and discussed the prospects of Ukrainian commercials being selected for the next Night of Advertisement Eaters. Incidentally, Frank Schruhl, president of the Euro RSCG New Europe advertising agency, which is among the organizers of the Night in Kyiv, said: “Ukrainian commercials have good chances of being selected. In the past two years the level of production and creativity of Ukrainian commercials increased significantly. There are many highly professional films worthy of being included in Bursiko’s collection.”
But what do the Ukrainian producers themselves think about the Ukrainian market trends? The Kinohraf agency, for one, complains that the client is rarely able or wishing to present his product in a jocular light. He prefers the so-called jam (scenes from the life of a perfect family caught in the process of drinking their tea or commercials mostly featuring attractive girls) or imitations of Western commercials. Meanwhile, the West considers us a secondary market and sends us commercials that are five or even seven years old. Still the clients are maturing, and quite soon commercial breaks will not irritate viewers and will instead become entertaining and effective.
