Monkey See, Monkey Do

This morning, during an early morning ride down from Kingsbury on the Jubilee Line a fine-suited, silver-haired man in the seat next to me was reading a book flattened out across his leather briefcase. The chapter title caught my eye: Consultants. Ride them like Horses. By the time we reached Baker Street he was asleep.

KFC's recent commercial showing call centre workers singing with their mouths full has become Britain's most complained about ad, after the the ASA received 1,671 complaints.

It rejected them: "As teaching good table manners is an ongoing process needing frequent reminders at meal times, we do not agree that the advertisement would have a detrimental effect".

Hardly surprising if you think about it- any acknowledgement that watching people behaving uncouthly on TV might actually contribute to the spread of bad manners in general would represent an important if indirect concession to the persistent grousers who insist that the violence on our screens feeds the violence in the world around us.

I guess they migh have had resorted to this tried and tested line of argument: that only those already pre-disposed to sing with their mouths full are at risk from KFC's ad!

There's an interesting post here by Dan Jaffe (of ANA - Association of National Advertisers) which points out that the childhood obesity has reached epidemic proportions during a decade that overall above-the-line expenditures and the number of food, beverage and restaurant ads seen by children under age 12, have declined. Meanwhile Societies like Sweden that have banned advertising to children have not been able to reduce their obesity rates.

Anyway, it's been a while since an ad made any sort of impression on me, but last week two did:

- Esure have made appropriately memorable use of a mouse character to promote their online service. Nearly a decade of mainstream eBusiness and I'm genuinely surprised that this is (apparently) the first time such an easily-recommendable idea has been realised. And in a sector where channel-personification was deployed to such great effect by Direct Line.

- The AA's new ad portrays some of the curious circumstances in which those little yellow vans have been called out to save the day. It's one of those ads you used to see a lot of in the early 90s: a series of little human-interest vignettes set to classical music. You can tell how this one started: "What data do you have on unusual call-outs?" It's still very well done and stands out as the technique has falled into dis-use of late.