During the summer “silly season” the adverts are often the best things on TV. During today’s bout of trash-TV viewing, I saw this amazingly funny piss-take advert:
It’s of course an homage to the Sony Bravia bouncy balls advert filmed in San Francisco. I think it’s the cultural and architectural references/comparisons between San Fran and the non-descript Northern England working town that makes the parody so so funny.
(I still find it hard to believe that the original Bravia advert isn’t CGI, but apparently it’s real. We even drove down the road where they filmed it a few months back. In fact Sony have put up a whole website that shows you how they made it (in one take, no less) – probably because so many people like me dismissed it as just CGI.)
Back to the British advert, which is for an otherwise pretty crappy soft-drink called Tango, and it turns out the advert was filmed in Swansea (in Wales). In fact the local residents on the street where it was filmed created a campaign website to stop it being filmed and now to boycott the product.
Of course, it’s all a great PR stunt created by the advertising company (the domain is registered to a PR company) – but a great follow-through. The adverts on YouTube are probably uploaded by the PR company too.