Global warming?
That’ll do nicely, says adland. Breandan O Broin forecasts what may lie ahead and fires bouquets at Carlsberg and Chef brands for the use of Irish in their ads

Our first ST column of the new year (What, another one? Already?) opens with the finest piece of cataclysmic copywriting we’ve seen since St John frightened the living daylights out of us with his hallucinogenic revelations (a great bedtime read and sure to make a stunning cartoon movie by Pixar some day soon).

It’s written by a bloke called Vernon Coleman in an ad to promote his new book Oil Apocalypse – How to Survive, Protect your Family and Profit During the Coming Years of Crisis – a great title in itself and one that ticks every known box in the direct marketing writer’s manual. Under the sub-heading This isn’t the Script for a Horror Movie, the well-crafted copy goes:

The lorry that collects your rubbish won’t be running.
Streetlights won’t burn.
Hospitals will have to close.
Factories will shut their gates.
Offices will empty, banks will be bankrupt.
There won’t be any more TV.
You won’t be able to recharge your mobile phone.
Your computer will crash, for one final time.

Within a generation, five out of six people on the planet will die
I’ll repeat that.
Within a generation, five out of six people on the planet will die.

This isn’t the script for a horror movie.
This isn’t fiction.
This is what’s going to happen.
And it’s already started.

If we can’t make great ads and good money out of putting a halt to the onrush of Armageddon, our industry doesn’t deserve to survive. We will all be Coleman’s before the year is out. Indeed, if there is a God, then He/She clearly believes in ads.

Just as the industry began to get cold feet about its future in the ice-cold digital age, along comes global warming to warm the cockles of our creative hearts and give a golden glow to our bottom lines. ST reckons there will be state, semi-state and commercial advertisers with money to burn battling it out for the right to be greener.

Many will have genuine ethical concerns, some vested interests and others political agendas and a few may even have solutions. All will want to get their point across. As the public information highways get clogged with point and counterpoint, the need to turn to ads to make your case will grow at a faster rate than China’s carbon footprint.

Our local changing scenarios have already seen the original agricultural truism that there was money in muck morph into fields of Irish green alter from being polluted by farting cattle to being populated by farty men pulling golf trolleys.

CUPLA FOCAIL ABOUT A CUPLA COMMERCIALS

For aeons, I’ve been banging on about the potential for brand-building that lies in the creative use of Irish in advertising. During 2007, Foras na Gaeilge organised one of the best promotional events of the year by celebrating the best Ads of the Decade on TG4. One got the distinct idea that the winning agencies and advertisers were more than happy with their marketing investments and their award recognition.

Now, along comes two major brands – one Irish, the other multinational – with commercials that incorporate the language into the fabric of the concept, rather than merely using in a translation.

The first commercial, created by Leo Burnett for Jacob Fruitfield, brings us to the heart of the Gaelteacht where suburban young lads bemoan the lack of Chef sauce and cheekily phone home for a bottle of the brown stuff.

The second commercial shows lads who could be their older brothers out on the tear in territories far from home relying on the confused cupla focail to get them out of a hotspot and help them pull the local cailini deasa while downing a Carlsberg or two.

Both concepts succeed in recreating the Irish of our youth, the bits and pieces of it, the fun of it and in a way, the innocence of it. But they’re not indulging in nostalgia, far from it, they are both living accurate representations of contemporary urban Irish society – where everything, including the language is up for grabs if it fits in with your needs.

Bualadh bas Chef, bualadh bas Carlsberg.

PROBABLY COOL Diageo and its agency, Irish International BBDO, are to be applauded for the use of a cupla focail in the latest Carlsberg TV commercial where the Irish clubgoers are told to either dance or speak Irish. RTE’s Sharon Ni Bheolain even gets a nod.

CELEBRITIES WHO AREN’T SQUARES

Which agency or advertiser will have the nerve and the know-how to hone in on one of our almost-hidden national treasures and bring the mellifluous tones of the one and only Larry Gogan out into the open of TV commercial celebrity status?

Gogan is a goldie and not just for the oldies. If ex-Euro Song stars can make it, why not Larry who has carried the torch for pop music since its very inception. Fame and fortune await the brave and hopefully Larry will earn a good few bob as well. On a linked note, veteran British deejay Tony Blackburn was asked what he might have opted for as a career of spinning discs hadn’t turned out to be his lucrative forte.

“In another life” replied Tony, “I’d have gone into advertising.

It’s the talking-nonsense side of the business I’d have been good at.”

Clearly, Blackburn is not as daffy as he often appears.

FACEBOOK FACTS

Advertising creatives were one of the earliest converts to online social networking sights and they’re still among its heaviest users. (Who knows what bright ideas might lurk within those viral depths?) But it seems like things are getting out of mouse.

A recent UK survey by a leading employment law firm estimates some 233 million hours are lost every month due to employees surfing the net, with social networking sights proving the greatest temptation. All this is costing UK industry a staggering