Take a road less travelled – to love, and sales

I LOVE our country’s wide open spaces and its sometimes stark beauty and I love driving, so I suppose any ad that combines both is bound to grab my attention.

So it is with the TV ad for Opel’s new Mokka Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV). The sector is said to be the fastest-growing in the car market, as urbanites pretend they can be the Camel Man (or Woman). These cleverly styled cars give the impression of space and off-road ability to those who yearn for the Great Outdoors.

Opel’s ad features the car in the places likely to get those suburban pulses racing – from the lights of the city to the forests, to the big country of the Karoo.

It’s a road trip and who can resist a road trip?

Not only is the Mokka portrayed as the car that can get you there, it is also the facilitator for a changed life, as we see in the closing frames where, at sunset, the man proposes to the woman.

Ag, shame… a real lekker South African story.

The ad will certainly get through to those young people and families who are perhaps a bit tired of their conventional sedans or hatchback. It awakens the romantic, too, and leaves the viewer feeling fine.

That’s what an ad is supposed to do: showcase the product and leave people with an experience or a story that will make them feel something and make them remember.

So an Orchid to Opel and to Admakers in Cape Town.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a Vodacom ad to give an Orchid to, but hen-pecked Errol is back on our screens.

He was the one who tried to travel to the ends of the earth (in South Africa at least) to get away from the voice of his wife. But, wherever he went, so did Vodacom’s signal – and she was able to scream at him: “Errol!”

In the latest ad, Errol thinks he’s come up with the solution – hiding in an underground pipeline with the manhole cover securely battened down. But, no – the phone rings. To the tune of I will follow you, he takes the call and hears: “Errol!”

A neat commercial message and the welcome retur n of a funny character. An Orchid to Vodacom.

One thing we keep being told the internet is that it is instantaneous. Its proponents, including Habari Media, a digital specialist, say the medium offers quick and easy access to figures.

Why, then, did Habari’s press release on its analysis of tweets around the DA’s conference in Port Elizabeth – headlined “Habari Media Twitter conversation insights into the #DACongress” hit my screen only on Friday, May 15, five days after the end of the conference?

Not the instant analysis you people keep talking about, was it?

If you weren’t able to pull that simplistic assessment off the net in a few hours on Sunday night (after Musi Maimane’s election as new DA leader) and put it out on Monday morning, then you shouldn’t have bothered doing it at all.

No one in the media is interested in a five-day-old story. By thinking they would be, you didn’t understand the media.

And making that lack of understanding public in the most embarrassing way is not good marketing for your company. So you get an Onion, Habari.

Apologies to Publicis Machine for not according them their welldeserved Orchid last week for Land Rover’s print campaign.