Every Step Counts - Another Cannes Winner

The "Burst" campaign for Schweppes in Australia was another winner in Cannes 2008. The branding concept is have your own "Schweppervescence moment" and the agency behind it is George Patterson Y&R based in Melbourne.

As you can see, with a charming mix between image and music the ad is somewhat artistic and very pleasant to watch once and again:

Now, from my point of view this ad is a gem, considering that advertising campaigns make pretty obvious something that almost any idea (no matter the industry) need to go through and that is what I call the "three blessed steps ":

- First, you have to have a good idea. (sometimes is extremely easy, sometimes not)

- Second, you have to be able to communicate that idea to the client in a way that they can see the potential or the benefits of the idea. That second part sometimes means get them to visualize something that you have in your head or in a draft but that is not the final product.

- Last but not least, you have to produce the idea with the quality you have in mind and the budget you have at hand.

As you can see, the whole process is not easy at all -each step having its own challenges-, and if any of these steps go wrong the final product -if you ever get there-, will probably go wrong too.

With those steps in mind I know I see ads in a different way. Sometimes I can't believe the client bought that idea, sometimes I am more amazed than the average in front of an awesome spot because, again, I am impressed for the quality of the final product considering those previous steps. The idea is good, they obviously were able to sell it to the client and the final product was carefully crafted using slow motion cameras at 10,000 frames per second to capture the final moments in the trajectories of water balloons.

Now, next time you see a commercial that you don't like at all, think about these three steps and try guessing... was the original idea really bad? Or maybe the original concept wasn't so bad and it was during the process of "selling" it that it became what it is? Or was it completely ruined by the execution?