If you didn’t know what Your Girlfriend got up to when you weren’t around, it was all revealed on the Internet recently; it even made it to mainstream TV.
It left many old biddies choking on the lemon in their G&Ts and had fathers answering awkward questions from their kids, longing for the old days of three channels and a censorship board that was verskriklik staunch about preserving our modesty.
But, unlike Olivia Newton John in her music video, Physical, production company Your Girlfriend was only trying to pimp a mysterious new flavour of chewing gum for Stimorol.
Mega Mystery is a flavour without a name and Your Girlfriend has been feverishly at it with Ogilvy in Cape Town to film the new campaign.
The idea is to inspire viewers to name the flavour. The protagonists of the new commercial share their impressions of the new flavour in a record store. Through a series of finely crafted character changes that sees one protagonist ripping off multiple faces to reveal other characters underneath, they eventually realise the flavour seems like romance to them. This clearly emphasises how close Your Girlfriend and Ogilvy got during this process.
Your Girlfriend explains: “It’s the type of script that creatives tell you about and then we all laugh and imagine how much fun it would be if we actually got to make ads like that. The draft I was given to treat on worked beautifully and didn’t need any tampering with. It was more a case of myself and the agency adjusting and crafting the moments to make them work as well as they could. In the end I think we succeeded in what we set out to do.’
The public reception to Your Girlfriend’s new ad has ranged from “Wow!’ to “WTF?’ – but in a good way. All in all, it may inspire clients to stop being verskriklik staunch about preserving their brand’s modesty. We do need to move on after all.
By Anton Crone
Screen Africa magazine – May 2012
