The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #53: Serta Counting Sheep

Shaun and his brethren weren't the only flock to emerge from the Aardman fold and attain superstardom. At the break of the new millennium, the Bristol-based animation studio found great success on the other side of the pond with a series of ads promoting Serta-brand mattresses. The premise of the campaign, devised by advertising agency Doner, had it that Serta mattresses were so fabulously comfortable that kipping on one might earn you a visit from a very irate band of sheep who objected to your choice of pad. These were no ordinary field-dwelling ovine, but the Counting Sheep, the woolly jumpers whom, in more restless times, you might traditionally have summoned to aid you in accessing the land of nod. These sheep thrived on insomnia, and it was their mission to keep your nights from getting too cushy for their comfort. In Serta, they'd found a formidable adversary, one they feared could potentially make the practice of sheep-counting obsolete, and they weren't shy about barging into the bedrooms of former clientele to make their dissatisfaction known. An aggressive business model that seldom worked out for our flock, although hilarious antics often ensued.

How many Counting Sheep there actually were was anybody's guess - in theory, their numbers could have stretched on indefinitely, depending on the wakefulness of the client they were serving. Each sheep was distinguishable by their identification number, spray-painted onto their fleeces in the style of their barnyard counterparts, and various distinct personalities emerged across the series. 1 was naturally the leader, and the most officiously outspoken of the sheep. 13 was inevitably a magnet for physical misfortune, while 36 was a father whose offspring required orthodontic work, 8 was a ditz and 86 was the black sheep (although not literally) of the group, who in one commercial was caught partaking in an illicit relaxation session upon a Serta, and was defenestrated by 1 for his infidelity. For the campaign's initial run the sheep were brought to life with Aardman's signature stop motion, combined with footage of live action humans, although later installments switched to using computer animation - meaning that the sheep unavoidably picked up something of the uncanny valley that I find lurks in all CG Aardman productions made to replicate Nick Park's style, and which is absolutely all over the movie Flushed Away (not so much Arthur Christmas, which isn't as beholden to Park's look).

The campaign had a bit of an ongoing story for the sheep, detailing the impact the Serta scourge had on their livelihood and the various measures they took to combat it. We followed them as they attempted to find alternative forms of employment, sought legal advice from an unscrupulous lawyer (I'm not sure if this was ever followed up with any ads detailing the court case he assured them they had), traded tales of hardship with a hobo, protested outside a mattress sale and outright sabotaged a couple of others. At their most classic, though, the ads were centred around the core scenario of the sheep hanging out in people's bedrooms and berating them for wanting to cut ties. It's a charmingly absurdist means of getting across the intended message that Serta mattresses are pleasurable to sleep on, but you've got to love how counter-intuitive it is in-universe. Get a Serta and the upshot seems to be that you'll have an indefinite number of talking sheep amassing around your bed and keeping you up by belligerently challenging your consumer choices. You've effectively traded in one form of sleeplessness for another, unless you had the foresight to acquire a guard dog like an unnamed lady in one ad, or to change your locks like the Hendersons. And, even if you were resting upon a Serta, just how well were you going to sleep knowing that these vengeful sheep might be wandering in at any time and glowering all over you? Adding to the awkwardness was that the conflict was often framed as being akin to the breakdown of a sexual relationship as opposed to a professional one, with orgasm innuendo cropping up at least twice. In one commercial, a client breaks the bad news that she's been faking her sleeplessness for months in order to appease the sheep. And in the aforementioned spot where 86 is caught cheating with a Serta mattress, he brings attention to himself with his wildly ecstatic shrieks about its luxuriousness (giving the momentary impression that he's engaged in a threesome with the Kandinskys). In both cases, the Serta is the irresistible temptation that lures you into backstabbing your bedfellows.

Here's the great paradox with the Serta Counting Sheep - their business practices might be obnoxious, but they themselves end up being loveable underdogs. You admire their spunk, and their willingness to fight for their established domain. They are the downtrodden little guys daring to take a stand, and you're rooting for them to prevail against the mattress giant threatening to slap them with irrelevancy. The most satisfying campaign installments were the ones where they managed to scrape a rare victory - for example, when they get Tom banished from the Serta and onto the couch by blowing to his wife that he's been lying to her about being at work all day to cover up his clandestine golfing session. Serta might fix five of the most common sleep problems, but it won't cleanse a shady soul. That was pretty ingenious of the sheep, and I wish them nothing but luck in pursuing this particular recourse, although it introduces further unsettling implications regarding the sheep's ability to spy on us and harvest our dirtiest secrets.

It's perhaps in part because of the sheep's intrinsically sympathetic nature that more recent Serta ads have tended to downplay the antagonistic angle and instead show them cuddling up on their mattresses and tucking human occupants in. It's actually kind of surreal if you've been following the flock's history and know that their in-character inclination really should have been to turf those people out. In the end the sheep became synonymous with the brand (with Serta having established a neat sideline in sheep merchandising), so it doesn't matter how much sense it makes from a narrative standpoint, but I wonder what the explanation would be in-universe for this unlikely truce? Did the sheep and Serta finally figure out how to make their respective trades coexist? Is the implication that the sheep are actually working for Serta now (in other words, helping to feed the beast that killed them)? Or maybe the flock's suppressed love of the mattress's softness finally got the better of them. For that was the single biggest shame in the Serta Sheep's closet - they were latent Serta cheerleaders all along, as evidenced in all instances where they could be enticed into making physical contact with the mattress, and were immediately taken by how fabulous it felt. Fact is that 86 wasn't a lost sheep. He was just slightly ahead of the curve in making his Serta adoration explicit.

There couldn't possibly be anything more awkward and unfortunate in the Serta Sheep's closet, could there? If so, I'm not confident I have the spoons.