The new issue of Private Eye’s Ad Nauseum column highlights the recent BBC 6 Music TV ad which you may have seen, featuring Vampire Weekend on the soundtrack.
(Also available here)
It points out, as the person who uploaded the above version of the ad, that ad agency Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R were probably, um, inspired by a guy called Blu who created a wonderful film called Mutu:
Anyway, that’s not really the radio ad I wanted to talk about.
No.
It’s the new Nicky Campbell Five Live ad I wanted to bring up. Here it is, in case you’ve been unlucky and not yet seen it (the aspect ratio’s wrong sadly):
It’s dreadful. He’s in a studio packed with people (with plenty of diversity) who represent “the nation” and are going to talk about today’s “big story”. They all put on headphones and instead of talking to one or more of them, or a discussion getting underway, we get “Tom on line 1”. Huh?
This is all to promote the strange new Five Live breakfast line-up where Shelagh Fogarty starts at 6am on her own before Nicky Campbell joins her at 7am. Then at 9am, Shelagh leaves and Nicky gets an hour on the phones before at 10am, Victoria Derbyshire takes over on the phones – her show effectively bumped back an hour. That means no more midday news, which is a shame.
Now Campbell’s good at phone-ins, and I’m sure that creating a generic ad about a phone-in is difficult, since the very nature of thing means that it has to be about a subject. But this is poor fare indeed. Creatively poor.
Of course I’m not suggesting the creatives responsible trawl the net for ideas however…
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In other radio news, if you’ve not already caught the Elbow concert on the red button, do so before it disappear, or watch it here (I know it’s embeddable, but it ends on Saturday, whereas this blog doesn’t).
And if like me, you enjoy 2ManyDJs aka Soulwax, you’ve got to listen to last night’s Colin Murray show where they sat in. The first hour features 400 intros all mixed together.
And I should also point you to Absolute Radio’s videos of Chris Martin – did I mention he came in last week? There’ll be four songs in total to see, with a song going up each day this week. At time of writing, there are three to watch already.