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The results are in and Australians have spoken, KFC has made the top spot ad. What’s the secret to securing a spot in the top five?
By asking Aussies about their favourite ad, we can understand which advertising (and brands) come to mind easily for consumers, and the nature of their positive feelings and associations of the brand. We think we get a pretty good read of which Australian advertisers are doing a good job and why.
Resident Aussie Advertising Lead Alex Forrester, Business Director at TRA, weighs in on what makes the top ads so memorable. It all comes down to the TRA Creative Edge framework, which measures how likely an ad is to be:
Remarkable: Grab people's attention
Rewarding: Entertain them
Remembered: How strongly the brand is linked to the creative idea
This is a textbook example. A perfect combination of great human insight and brand truth.
The human insight is so familiar, that sometimes we do feel defeated by life, and the brand truth works perfectly – KFC is good because it’s bad. It’s also a great example of category disruption, food can be unhealthy sometimes! This combination of novel and surprising elements makes the execution of the ad more remarkable and rewarding.
But there are also tactical reasons behind the ad’s success. The first is the audio element. I love a catchphrase. Play me a jingle any time – I’m not going to discriminate between mnemonic devices. This ad works its arse-off because ‘did somebody say KFC?’ is such an accessible, repeatable phrase.
The product is also the heart of the story structure. It’s a coded brand ad, a recipe for success as the format makes it easier for KFC to incorporate promotions and specific product sales activations. Winner winner chicken dinner.
Finally, repetition. Perhaps one of the most underrated words in the ad world. Yet KFC masterfully repeats the same story over and over in such an interesting way that it has seared into our memories.
I need to fess up. My gut instinct on this ad was wrong. I assumed people would struggle to attribute it to Telstra because the brand isn’t obvious throughout the ad (making it less memorable). But this wasn’t the case, and why we do research before engaging in armchair opinion? We had very few ‘football bus’ or ‘this is country footy ad’ mentions in the data (although there are some). Instead, we had mostly mentions of ‘the Telstra footy ad’.
Choosing to hero a story about footy has created a gift from the brand to the viewer. In return, the viewer seems to be rewarding Telstra with good feeling and memory of the brand – brutally paraphrasing Les Binet, this is a key part in how advertising actually works.
I do not doubt that the temptation to make Telstra more visible was argued about in the development of the ad. But the data tells us that this wasn’t needed. A lot of the responses to this ad say something like ‘I don’t like Telstra but I like this ad’. Ultimately, it seems, it is a compelling enough story and overly branding the ad could have made viewers tune out from the start.
It’s a bold decision, which demonstrates that attribution (being ‘remembered’) is more complicated than just constant repetition of the logo. When executed expertly, the use of deliberate subtlety can work. All evidence here points that the ad is working exactly as planned – Telstra CMO, Brent Smart, has confirmed that ‘under branding’ was the intention of the ad.
ALDI’s creative teams have an uncanny gift for translating solid strategy into rewarding advertising with an acute awareness of customer experience. In other words,
ALDI is great at finding those ‘so true’ moments with their customers and reflecting them in advertising. It’s what’s made them more memorable than other, more predictable, ads.
Through ‘Shop ALDI First', ALDI has developed an instantly recognisable, and memorable, visual language. You instantly know it’s an ALDI ad. Every frame of the ad is recognisable. Slightly awkward, dream-like conversations are visualised in liminal ‘backroom’ settings, capturing the truth of the ALDI experience.
For many brands, achieving all three R’s on the TRA creative edge framework is tough. It might be an entertaining and attention-grabbing ad, but how well is it branded? It might be attention-grabbing and all about the brand, but does it generate enough emotional response to be remembered?
This balance is something Cadbury nails again and again. In this ad, they’ve captured the very specific, yet somehow universal, I’m-not-crying-your-crying emotional story about generosity. It’s the same feeling they generate across their ads – an unmistakably Cadbury feeling. Pair this with the iconic ‘glass and a half’ brand asset and a story of generosity, and you have an ad that ascends the benefits ladder faster and more directly than many can do. It’s very smart communication.
If I’m being ruthlessly honest, this was another surprise. I mean, it’s a nice ad. It has a mildly humorous punchline, the characters are likable and it’s relatable. It’s rewarding enough. But it doesn’t, on the face of it, include anything that would make it particularly remarkable or remembered. However, some very smart parts of this ad have put it on this list and I’m definitely NOT overthinking it.
It’s an old ad. On the top comment of the YouTube ad, user @dylanosborne-ux1uz writes ‘very smart reusing an old ad hoping no one would notice”, however, Mr Ux1uz might have overlooked the fact that Woollies DID want people to notice – or at least remember. That’s the point of ads, to get people to remember them. While using an old ad that still works is likely to annoy creative agency budgets, it’s MORE likely to be remembered if consumers have already seen it some time ago.
This is a window into the kind of shopping experience we want to have. We’re all that mum proud of our son at his first job, or that kid trying hard at our first job. It’s an ad made in a time before COVID, before ALDI, when Woollies was just a supermarket selling stuff in competition with Coles. Take us back there.
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