Cadbury Relaunches Gorilla & Trucks Ads
About a year ago Cadbury unveiled its £6.2m campaign for Dairy Milk featuring a gorilla playing the drum solo of Phil Collins’ track ‘In the Air Tonight’. The original Gorilla advert, launched during last year’s Big Brother 8 UK final on 31st August 2007, became a cult classic on its release last year, and was viewed more than 10 million times on YouTube. The advert also helped Cadbury’s sales to rise by nine-percent. The much-anticipated follow-up “Trucks” was released in March this year.
The hundreds of parodies e.g. Wonderbra, X Factor, RebelVirals and remixes of the original like 50 Cent, Eastenders and Word Up, posted on YouTube and sent in by fans, inspired A Glass and Half Full Productions to release a new Gorilla and Trucks version, to pay homage to all internet mash-up artists.
Last Friday night, during the Big Brother final, the two remixed adverts premiered on Channel 4 in a 180 second commercial break featuring a gorilla drumming along to Bonnie Tyler’s classic Total Eclipse of the Heart and a wacky airport race accompanied by Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer, replacing Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now as the musical accompaniment.
“We always had half an eye on doing something with it around the anniversary. We have taken inspiration from the way people have played with it online. We were always going to run the ads again. We could have been lazy and run the same versions, as a lot of old-fashioned advertisers would have, or we could live in the modern world” said Laurence Green, the chairman of Fallon.
Fallon’s Gorilla advertisement achieved the ultimate advertising accolade when it was awarded the prestigious Grand Prix at the Cannes International Advertising Festival in June 2008.
Only time will tell whether ‘the Dairy Milk effect’ works its magic on Bonnie and Jon …
Source: The Guardian, The Telegraph