ALEX GRIEVE AND ADRIAN ROSSI

Executive creative directors, Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO

If you want to know why Pixar is the most creative company on the planet, here’s the answer: “The unifying theory of two plus two.” It was coined by the man with the world’s most impressive CV: A ndrew Stanton, writer and/or director of Toy Story, Finding Nemo and Wall-e. It starts from the insight that we are all natural problem-solvers. We love to work shit out – it turns our brains on. So, in telling a story, don’t give the audience four – give them two plus two. Allowing us to join the dots holds our attention to the story. It makes us feel involved. It makes us feel smart. Above all else, it makes us care. Let’s apply this theory to this week’s collection of ads. First up is an offering from one of the most unlovable brands on Earth: NATWEST. Directed by the consistently excellent Jeff Labbe, it looks great. The edit is slick. The casting considered. As ads for banks go, it’s not half-bad. But just when it starts to get interesting, it over-explains. Instead of letting us work for our dinner, it grabs us roughly by the face and shoves an inedible lump of product info into our gobs. And there, just like that, we stop caring. There’s a reason it’s t wo plus t wo. Two plus t wo is pretty easy to work out. If you’re a genius like David Lynch, you can get away with the unifying theory of 279,342 plus 98.9876. If you’re making a yoga ad, you can’t. Frankly, we haven’t got a Danny what’s going on in the LULULEMON spot. RENAULT’S “Behind car doors” employs some professional Instagrammers to lend their manufactured version of happy families to advertise – you guessed it – a family car. Stories only work if they’re true. And we all know that the only things that happen on family car journeys are terrible rows between Mummy and Daddy that make everyone cry. The NYTOL ad is like a Woody Allen film. Unfortunately, not Good Woody who, in stories such as Manhattan, Sleeper and Crimes and Misdemeanors, makes us care deeply about his characters through a mix of comedy and pathos, but Bad Woody, responsible for Hollywood Ending, Whatever Works and Scoop. To be fair to Nytol, it’s not nearly as bad as those three films, which are all utterly shite. Can anyone save this week’s batch of ads? Yes. CANON can. Despite the fact that it looks “inspired” by Spike Jonze’s “Hello tomorrow” spot for Adidas, it’s properly good. It’s beautiful and mysterious and full of wonder. Instead of the end, it’s open-ended. Instead of thinking for us, it respects the fact that we might just want to do that ourselves. Its new positioning is “Live for the story”. Amen to that. Advertising today seems hell-bent on mimicking the Kardashians. Show everything, leave nothing to the imagination, assume the viewer is an idiot. True, it may occasionally break the internet, but it also kind of breaks our hearts. Worst of all, it makes people not care and that, above all else, is something as an industry we need to start caring about.