"Glasses" (circa 1993) is one of TAC's most baffling advertisements, and the first I would likely point to when making my case that their preferred strategy for piling on the emotional outbursts can sometimes work to the detriment of the final impact.
Not that there isn't a really ingenious idea in "Glasses", an ad built around a cunning bit of conceptual irony hinted in its deceptively unassuming title. Shot from the perspective of a driver attempting to navigate an urban highway, the view is repeatedly obstructed by a series of beer glasses positioned in front of their windscreen. The more glasses are added, the more blurred the road ahead becomes, until we're on our fourth glass and have our inevitable crash into the back-end of a lorry. The "glasses" at the centre of the ad are presented as a reversal on the kind of "glasses" that make eyesight more focussed, as a metaphor for how alcohol impairs your ability to make sound judgements.
It's a playful set-up, and one might argue not especially TAC-like in its approach. TAC are notorious for the unflinching realism of their campaigns; the more abstract devices used in "Glasses" immediately makes it one of the curious outliers of their portfolio. It makes more sense when you realise that the concept originated from outside sources, this being a remake of a drink driving ad first used by the Singapore Traffic Police in 1992 - one that attracted enough overseas admiration that it was also recycled for a Canadian campaign from Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). It's not surprising - the Singapore original is inventive, memorable and sharply to the point. It's also a fine example of how you can concoct a punchy drink driving campaign without any onscreen death or violence. Sure, it's implied that you, the driver, got into a horrendous, possibly fatal accident (the original version sees you swerving directly into the path of a bus), but the lack of corporeal figures means that there aren't any external characters to make those consequences solid and manifest; the horrors are directed inward, with that final ugly screech and queasy fade to red saying it all. For their part, MADD were content in contributing a straightforward repackaging of the Singapore original, but TAC? Let's face it, that isn't their thing. Does it sound in the least bit in character for them to put out an ad where no one is seen to be brutally killed or maimed, leaving everyone around them permanently traumatised? Oh no, they went the extra mile and attempted to implement a brand new, fully TACian twist to the scenario, so that we actually get to see the narrative continue beyond the first-person simulation, introducing real-world consequences into a set-up that had looked as though it might be entirely self-contained.
In other words, they tried to TACtify the unTACtable, and the results are awfully telling.
The original "Glasses" ad from Singapore.
The TAC version of "Glasses" has not one, but two narrative extensions. In the first, we see a bystander approach the scene of the accident and reel in horror at what they find. This section isn't so overdone, being not altogether different to the trucker's shoulders shrinking at the end of "Nightshift". It's in the second extension, when we're witness to a couple of police officers showing up at the door of the driver's family, that the ad frankly degenerates into a deluge of cliches, to the point that you might as well have come prepared with a Bingo card. We see the bereaved spouse having the obligatory emotional break down. All that's left is for a child to wander onto the scene and act all innocent. Oops, right on cue. Go to bed Jessica.[1]
In theory, there is something pretty clever about showing how life continues beyond the driver's perspective, with insight into the consequences for those left behind. And yet, the individual pieces don't gel - the realism of the epilogue is so at odds with the abstractness of the opening sequence that the two effectively invalidate each other. It isn't a case of the closing realism signifying some stark return to earth after the giddiness of the opening, but two discordant styles uneasily occupying the same air time. Its Singaporean predecessor works as successfully as it does because it's committed to its concept and so elegantly immersive in its execution. The TAC remake plays like two, perhaps even three different ads stitched together - to the point that I have to theorise that that is, in essence, what we're looking at. It wouldn't surprise me if the original plan was to do a straightforward recreation of the Singapore ad, before someone argued that the lack of emotional aftermath was too great a departure for TAC's brand, so they created an extra scene from another proposed script they had laying around. It also wouldn't surprised me if that reaction from the second motorist was an early attempt that got sent back with notes when it was deemed to not go far enough. All in all, it reads as there being too many cooks in the TAC and Grey Melbourne kitchen, with the end-product revised and reassembled so many times over that it came out lacking any coherent vision (ironic?). If that epilogue had been allowed to function as its own stand alone piece, then I daresay it would have worked a whole lot better (although the girl's unconvincing "Mummy, what's wrong?" would still have been a sticking point - you might expect a small child who had witnessed her mother breaking down in that manner to be significantly more unsettled). Here, it feels like a display of self-indulgence on TAC's part.
The TAC remake of "Glasses".
It's also noteworthy that, for whatever reason, the TAC version doesn't implement the same sonic tricks as the Singapore original. The Singaporean version has the audio getting gradually more distorted, merging with that of a bar atmosphere, as a further indicator of the alcohol's dominating influence. In TAC's ad, the audio stays consistent throughout.
I think it says something of just how awkwardly cobbled together TAC's "Glasses" is when you look at how it fared in the 1999 study conducted by the Monash University Accident Research Centre. There, the most notable response from test subjects to "Glasses" came in the disparity in its perceived pleasantness between recall-based and viewing-based data. Subjects asked to recall this one from memory rated it as one of TAC's most pleasant ads, but that rating dropped like a rock amongst subjects who had only just viewed it. As the study notes:
"The recalled and viewed responses were similar in all cases except for the Glasses
advertisement, where it was recalled to be relatively pleasant but viewing the advertisement resulted in a substantial reduction in the mean factor score. This is most likely the result of failing to recall the ending of the advertisement, where there is an emotive response from a bystander. Seeing this during the viewing of the advertisement may have resulted in a reduction in the perceived pleasantness of the advertisement."
In other words, the central conceit of the glasses being stacked one by one before the windscreen is what tended to stick with viewers about this one. The emotive epilogue was so disconnected that it was easy to overlook that it was part of the same advertisement. I'd say the moral here is not to mess with the classics.
[1] I know, that one's RTA, not TAC. Different part of Australia.
No comments:
Post a Comment