The Chocolate Log

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Just add chocolate

 What can’t be improved by adding chocolate? Especially at Christmas. Every year, the papers get inundated with the latest in festive gastronomical ‘innovation’, but – to be honest – it often more closely resembles the mashing-together of relatively popular products in an attempt to gain some PR and a few bonus sales.

But that’s the attitude of a Scrooge! Christmas is for celebrating, and so we’re here to praise the culinary generosity of Asda, who are offering Wensleydale with Chocolate & Orange this December. Why wouldn’t you want a large wedge of cheese filled with chunks of chocolate and bits of orange? It has actually sold out online – people are getting into the holiday cheer.

Or perhaps they’ve got overexcited, likely after enjoying a few sips of this year’s must-try drink: hot chocolate mixed with red wine. With semisweet chocolate chips, dry red wine, milk, sugar, and a pinch of salt, it’s hardly a kale smoothie, but we’re here to enjoy Christmas, calories and headaches be damned.

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Feed your TV feed

Snickers, the chocolate best known for its nuts, used to be called Marathon. No-one thinks you should eat a Snickers during a marathon, and no-one wants eating a chocolate bar to feel like a gruelling twenty-six-mile run, so you can see why they switched to Snickers. But why Snickers? It was the same name as its creator Frank Mars’s favourite horse. And now, that long-dead horse’s namesake advises you that ‘You’re not you when you’re hungry’.

Dave, the TV channel best known for endless re-runs of Top Gear and Mock the Week, used to be called UK Gold 2. You can see why Dave was a catchier name. But why the name Dave itself? Because apparently ‘everyone knows a bloke called Dave’. As its idents like to remind you, Dave is ‘the home of witty banter’, which is strange, because a bloke called Dave isn’t normally considered a home.

While Dave isn’t a person, he recently became a different not-person, called Rupert, because he was hungry. It seems that when Dave, a fictional person who seems to own a TV channel named after him that only shows what he likes (?), gets hungry, he turns into Rupert, another fictional person who owns a TV channel that shows an eclectic mix of French impressionist cinema, documentaries on the art collections of stately homes, and coverage of the World Chess Championship.

Unlike every other ad Snickers has ever run under the global platform of ‘You’re not you when you’re hungry’, the person (?) in question here actually changes their name when they get hungry, not just their appearance. It is a brilliant concept, but its clarity got a little confused in the execution. Besides the case study video that appearing in industry press, it doesn’t seem like it got noticed anywhere, not even by Dave’s viewers. Maybe the teams behind it were hungry?

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Apparently there are some Christmas ads

This is the obligatory Chocolate Log Christmas ad round-up.

You may have noticed that lots of brands like to tell people about their products and services at Christmas, because that is a time of year when people like to buy more things than usual. This approach was popularised by the department store John Lewis, which has few direct competitors but needed to drive consideration.

Since then, supermarkets, which all have lots of competitors, have started to make big, expensive Christmas ads, in the hope that people will drive to different stores than they usually do because of a snowy pub mysteriously full of food or kitchens full of diverse yet relatable families or a children’s movie featuring a talking Peruvian bear.

There are some brands that are intrinsically linked to Christmas, like Quality Street, and other brands that are sort of but not really, like Coca-Cola. And then there are brands like Vodafone, KFC, and Corn Flakes, which use the opportunity to drive relevancy at a hectic time of year and spend lots of money on media.

The Chocolate Log declines to opportunity to comment on John Lewis’s ‘Moz the Monster’, in the hope that the lack of media attention will take the pressure off the teams behind the 2019 ad and allow them to come up with something as special as 2011’s ‘The Long Wait’.

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IKEA is boring

Pre-roll ads. You can skip them after five seconds. The usual tactic these days isn’t even to try to make those first five seconds really compelling – it’s just to try to cram everything into those first five seconds and then have twenty-five seconds of exposition, detail, and story when you already know the ending.

IKEA likes to do things differently. Instead of focusing on those five seconds, they went for five minutes. And rather than try and make them exciting, they’re deliberately boring. The brand themselves calls them ‘Irresistible Pointless TrueView Ads’.

The positioning as always comes under their overarching comms platform of ‘Where Life Happens’, which recently translated into the ‘Wonderful Everyday’ in the UK. You can see how these deliver on that, and apparently they delivered on viewing figures too, with average viewing time coming up past three minutes, and 39% (of what?) watching in entirety.

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Skittles gets scary

We’re well used to surreal advertising from Skittles. What makes it so smart is that usually the product itself is integrated right into the strangeness– we’ve had a man who turns everything he touches into Skittles, people with Skittles stuck to their faces, and even a mother and son sharing a bag of Skittles through an umbilical cord. Pretty scary stuff.

But in something of an odd move, the latest Skittles ad doesn’t feature any Skittles at all besides a title-card. There’s not even the line ‘Taste the Rainbow’. Instead, it’s a two-minute horror film that’s actually quite spooky. And Mars, the brand owner, has got a few of them.

There’s a reasonably creepy one for Starburst, a straightforward pay-off for Snickers, and then one last one for M&M’s that keeps up the tradition of M&M’s having the worst advertising of any Mars confectionery brand. It’s barely branded content, and most interestingly it seems the directors didn’t even know they were making ads – it looks like they were commissioned by Fox Digital, who then sold the films as a package to Mars and added some title-cards.

What was especially clever was the delivery – Mars ran the whole two-minute Skittles film during an ad break for an NFL football game, which generated a lot of social chatter. Any two-minute ad attracts attention, and an unbranded horror film even more so. It’s a new direction from Mars, and one that does risk brand equity, but they certainly capture consumers’ attention.

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Green & Black’s gets dark-ish

 When we set out to cover the first ever TV ad for premium chocolate purveyor Green & Black’s, we didn’t anticipate needing to Google ‘how to play hide and seek’. In Green & Black’s version of the game – which, we hasten to add, is one of many acceptable variants of it – when someone is found by the seeker, they join the seeker in looking for the other hiders. Then, when the last person is found – i.e., the winner – they become the seeker.

Many consumers might not think so carefully about the mechanics of the gameplay featured in this latest TVC, especially when you’ve got some really rather impressive CGI wolves and a suitably haunting soundtrack. But we know this is the sort of incisive journalism that you’ve come to expect from The Chocolate Log, and that we’re more than happy to deliver.

The ad itself is for Green & Black’s new Velvet Edition Collection, for people who love dark chocolate but find the taste too bitter. So, people who like dark chocolate but don’t actually like dark chocolate. It’s an unusual target market, and hopefully there’s no overlap in the Venn diagram of those people and hide and seek traditionalists.

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Cadbury gets retro

Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night, drenched in a cold sweat, yearning for the confectionery packaging of days gone by? Not the chocolate itself, mind – the packaging.

Cadbury is here for you this Christmas. Just in case you wanted to pay a 25% premium for a fancy box that you’ll undoubtedly throw away at the end of the festive period, feeling mildly guilty that you’re not 100% sure what goes in recycling and what will end up in landfill.

The box itself seems to have some information about Cadbury’s past, as well as four sharing bars of chocolate that you can buy in contemporary packaging any day of the year. But, you know, the packaging.

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Snickers gets numpty

It’s not a new idea. But it works really darn well for them, and so they’ve rolled it out again. Snickers are replacing their brand name on the pack with terms for just who you might become when you’re hungry because, of course, you’re not you when you’re hungry.

Snickers are supporting the packs as part of a campaign called ‘Who are you?’ which seems to be some sort of secondary line for ‘You’re not you when you’re hungry’. The line doesn’t actually make an appearance on the pre-roll videos that are popping up, and unusually for Snickers they feel quite low-rent.

The humour’s not quite up to the high standard of other Snickers work, and it feels a little like it was cracked out in an afternoon without too much thought. Maybe the team was hungry?

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Kinder Bueno goes adult

According to Oxford Dictionaries, adulting is ‘the practice of behaving in a way characteristic of a responsible adult, especially the accomplishment of mundane but necessary tasks’.

Some see the term as exemplary of entitled, immature millennials and their inability to deal with the basics of everyday life. Others see it as indicative of how millennial adults don’t want to leave behind the perceived fun of childhood. Kinder are definitely in the second camp.  

Their latest campaign runs under the line ‘Now that’s adulting’. It sounds like they found a trend and jumped on it without much more strategic thought than that, but the execution is fun and playful, right down to its incorporation of the delicious-looking but traditional product sequence on a television inside the ad. The rhymes are a little questionable… do you prefer ‘later’ and ‘radiators’ or ‘apartment’ and ‘compartments’?

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Godiva actually goes adult

To celebrate its arrival in Sainsbury’s and co, Godiva has decided to position itself as far away as possible from its fellow supermarket brands. It’s calling its latest range ‘Masterpieces’, and it’s launching with the sultry TV ad you can see above, as well as an event called ‘The Godiva Masterpiece Banquet’.

They really see this as the beginning of an expansion, with the goal of becoming a £2 billion brand by 2022. They’re not saying upfront what they’re currently making, but they want to double sales. One way they’re not planning to expand is by buying Nestlé’s US confectionery, which they passed on back in April.

Beyond supermarkets, TV and experiential, the brand is also partnering with 20th Century Fox for Murder on the Orient Express, so we can look forward to Kenneth Branagh saying ‘Godiva Masterpieces’ in his best Poirot accent. (Or maybe Penelope Cruz, Willem Dafoe, Judi Dench, Johnny Depp or Michelle Pfeiffer, who are all also in the film.)

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What’s for dinner? Emojis

You might have seen some of Sainsbury’s recent advertising, which promises that something – anything – ‘is living well’. It’s a broad positioning that will undoubtedly cover a variety of strategically important territories, but to a consumer the only link between this and #fooddancing is the distinctive look and feel, all black and white with big Sainsbury’s orange type.

It looks good, and it looks even jazzier here, with the arrival of a sprinkling of emojis. And just in case you weren’t sure that this was a brand in touch with its youthful, edgy audience, the first emoji you see is the poo emoji. (Notice they’ve had to design their own emojis to avoid treading on any copyright toes…)

It’s a fun spot. It’s got a good insight. For some reason the video ends proclaiming that you can get GIF versions of the food animation on GIPHY, but they have picked up a fair few thousand views there and they’ve nicely not made them branded, besides the use of the Sainsbury’s orange font.

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Mentos meant to say hello

What would you call one mint from a pack of Mentos? A Mento? Just a mint? You’d be wrong. Mentos themselves call it a ‘dragee’. Apparently it’s a historical term, describing ‘a bite-sized form of confectionery with a hard outer shell—which is often used for another purpose (e.g. decorative, symbolic, medicinal, etc.) in addition to consumption’, according to Wikipedia.

We’re now a long way from the time of dragees being used in regular conversation, to the extent that they’re now not even just Mentos, they’re ‘Say Hello Mentos’. Each of the Mentos comes with a nice little phrase on it proposing you do something with something else: high five, hug, piggy back, air guitar… (We’re not sure how air guitar is a group activity.)

This is all getting shown off in a nice little film, featuring actors playing at various roles while handing sweets to members of the general public. It’s all quite pleasant, apart from the fact that everyone is hardwired to turn down offers of sweets from strangers, children or otherwise. Especially when they come out of a crumbled half-eaten tube of dragees.

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In a Galaxy far away...

After years of us watching Audrey Hepburn luxuriantly chewing her way through a Galaxy sharing block in the back of a vintage convertible, a new campaign has arrived. Audrey Hepburn is even more dead than she was previously, long gone and hopefully never to be resurrected again. In her place we have ‘a modern day heroine’, which appears to mean someone who has a smartphone and a train ticket.

The campaign taps into the busy life of a modern woman. It is beautifully filmed, as our ‘modern day heroine’ ends up down a rabbithole/train carriage in an oppressive wonderland, where metaphorical tweets, not-metaphorical to-do lists and slightly-metaphorical Candy Crush assail her.

Galaxy is a chance to unwind, to ‘undivide your attention’. Choose pleasure, apparently, means choosing Galaxy. It’s a nice angle for the contemporary world, and a little close to breaks. It’s not quite a chocolate bar in the bath, but that escapism is still there. Just not quite the Riviera.

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Very nice, VW

It’s not a TV ad. It’s content. It’s not a product demo. It’s a chap working up the confidence to try again. It’s not short. It’s about four minutes long. You might not even think it works.

The thinking is that driving an SUV gives you confidence. Commander of the road and all that. This spot gives someone some confidence that nicely goes beyond just driving.

The car is central, but never obnoxiously so. It’s a novel approach, and it does, if you’re in the right mood, land the message. It’s also got that emotional punch, which is de rigueur these days. Not many people have seen it yet. Take a look, see what you think.

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Not telling whoppers

LinkedIn probably has its fair sure of slightly exaggerations. A few white lies here and then. Some bullet points that stretch the truth. But Burger King is asking for something rare. They’re asking for the truth.

If you confess to having being fired from your job, you’ll get a free Whopper. You’ll need to be one of the first 2,500 people to publicly confess it, and you have to use the hashtag #WhopperSeverance, but maybe that is worth it.

We just think there had to be more of a link with the beef being flame-grilled, i.e. fired, and getting fired. But maybe not. Still – hopefully someone out there has seen a silver lining in their recent dismissal.

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Families aren’t that familiar

Apparently half of British people don’t think popular culture reflects the reality of modern families. And 84% of consumers are unable to recall seeing anything that featured a family like their own in the last six months. Enter McCain.

Yes, they sell oven chips. But lots and lots of families love oven chips. Families are front and centre in their latest TV ad, but it’s not just the picture-perfect family that we’ve all got used to on the telly. This is a right old mix.

Compare that with the second spot, for Dolmio. Yes. It’s got a nice turn from Dominic West, who probably cost a pretty penny. Mum’s making dinner and Dad’s playing video games. Sure, there’s ‘No Drama’, but there’s also not much inspiring there. How about we make family life, the centre of most people’s lives, a little more inspiring?  

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Grapes of wrath

There’s nothing quite like a truly bizarre flavour innovation to really get this editorial team riled up as well as incredibly intrigued. How about some candy floss flavour seedless grapes? Or some bubblegum flavour plums? Or even some doughnut flavour peaches?

All sounds a touch fruity, doesn’t it. But the taste test would actually be in the name of science – it’s a fascinating example of some really impressive fruit breeding. It took a ‘grape and stone fruit procurement manager’ to source these varieties, and apparently people work a lifetime to perfect these them.

It’s all about crossing one flavour with another, and apparently you literally have to do that – you use soft brushes, like the ones you might use to put on make-up, to cross the pollen from one plant to another. Pretty crazy technical stuff for some novelty confectionery-flavoured fruit.