Talk about catching them young. A campaign for The Economist (doing the rounds of almost all the ad blogs) caught my eye. Aimed at students of the Greater Philadelphia area, it involved supplying pizzerias with Economist-branded pizza boxes. The cover of the box reinforces the ‘Get a world view’ platform with a pie chart that connects pizza consumption and offers interesting data from around the world.
As an aside, for me this is the classic Economist-speak: understated style, wit and charm delivered unambiguously to connote that the brand helps you get the best world view. Sometimes it is about the downside of not reading The Economist. Either which way it works, specially when the wit is acerbic. But the new ads released last year made a departure from the template, as it were.
I for one, found the new effort jarring even though the brand idea was the same. Maybe I was too used to the red-background-clever-headline routine and the potential new readers are not? While the ‘look’ had become familiar the campaign was not a template of simply writing a headline against a red background – there were enough variations.
Looks like BBDO in the US and AMV BBDO in the UK are adopting two different ‘looks’ for the same brand. Which ones do you prefer?
