Most of the people that I know have, by now, seen the “awareness test”, used by THINK! (a government agency know for such wonderful and intuitive advice such as “Speed Kills” and “Don’t drink and drive”) as an advertisment recently. It’s a wonderful idea, and probably one of my all-time favourite adverts, being both remarkable intellectually pleasing, and yet, at the same time, actually puts it’s message (”It’s difficult to see what you aren’t looking for”) across. (For those of you who have not yet experienced the wonders of the world’s oddest basketball game, there’s a link at the bottom). 

Anyway, this leads me to the point of this post. They’ve brought out another one, which is even better! As their website seems to be slightly behind their advertising, you’ll have to watch the lovely Youtube version:

To me, this is really the epitome of advertising. Despite their strange insistance that what will get to people the most is flashy graphics and silly catch-phrases, I still think that something clever and surprising will do the job much better. It’s true that we all remember that Washing Machines live longer with “CALGON”, to have a break, have a KIT KAT, and many others, however it seems to me that something clever is going to stick with you in a slightly different way than a catchy jingle (not to mention that it’s difficult to think up a catchy jingle for the message “Don’t run over cyclists, it’s not very good for them, or your lack of jail time”). I won’t deny that I rather enjoyed the inimitable Barry Scott on the Cillit Bang adverts, but I’d much prefer to see more adverts of this calibre, despite the technical brilliance of the latest car or perfume ad. 

The other awareness test (and probably this one by the time anyone reads this) can be seen on http://dothetest.com and several others, not used for advertising, though still quite good, can be seen on Youtube.  That’s about as interesting as I can think of for the minute. They seem to have changed Songza so that you can’t embed music any more. I assume no-one ever clicked on the boxes anyway, so I’ll just leave it now.