Is your shizz built to last?

The other day my son’s class sang a song in assembly that they said was based on this ad:

As we were leaving I turned to my wife and said, ‘That’s a pretty obscure reference to base a 2014 Year Three assembly on.’ She agreed, but the thing I found even more interesting was the fact that we both remembered the ad. I then went home and showed it to my kids (8 and 4) and they both loved it. Could it run today and delight kids into buying crisps? Absolutely, and that’s a hell of an achievement for a little ad from the 80s.

So how long will your work live for, and does it matter?

I have no idea why certain ads have stuck in my mind for decades, but it does seem that animation and a catchy song was an easy route to victory:

But there were other ads that seemed to hang around for less obvious reasons:

I loved the slicing noise, but now I’ve had another look, what the hell was the point of slicing it? To show it had peanuts all the way through? Did anyone doubt that?

I remember the kissing snooker balls of this one, and the fact that my friends and I used to say ‘Der-der… follow the bear!’ in the playground a fair bit:

Anyway, are today’s ads doing the same thing to impressionable young minds? Is it possible to deliberately create something that will still last for decades even though it’s ‘just’ an ad?

I have a feeling the Cadbury’s Gorilla will last a while, but what about the Wonga.com puppets, or the Yeo Valley rappers? Will that weird little poo character for EDF imprint itself on our psyches? Will the adults of 2040 sing ‘Confused.com’ to the tune of YMCA?

Like almost everything on God’s clean earth, it doesn’t matter whether that happens or not; but it might give you quite a glow if you can pull it off.