Direct Response TV ads are all tedious and uninteresting. Perhaps not all but most of them are and this is something many people would agree with. So… how to turn a ‘dirty’ DRTV brief into a sexy piece of communication?

Just adding a bit of extra care to the execution. Let’s face it. There’s not much crazy stuff that one can do with the narrative. You need to show the handsets, display the ‘call to action’ on the screen for the entire length of the advert and explain the offer (x minutes + x SMS + free phone) in the clearest way possible. Add some very long t&c’s and you’ll have a DRTV ad. This is what this is all about and these few golden rules simply work very hard so no reason to ignore them.

However it’s not written anywhere that this needs to work against aesthetics and a bit of interesting storytelling and this is what we have done at Dare, where we’ve just delivered the final response to our first brief to create a TV ad for Vodafone. The result is a solid piece of work with some nice illustrations lovely animated by Monsieur Gavin, who’s invested some good long hours to crack this on.

Put your headphones on and judge by yourself. Then let me know what you think (sorry about the crappy YouTube quality, I’ll try to get a higher quality copy in the future and I’ll post it here).

Some credits (magazines always get it wrong so hopefully this will be a one place where everyone gets the right credit for the work):

Director: Gavin Leisfield
Account Director: Katherine Davidson
Group Account Director: Claire Hynes
Producer: Hannah Hilbery
Copywriter: Amy Gould
Art Director: Amy Gould
Illustration: Gavin Leisfield / Luke Stenzhorn
Animation: Gavin Leisfield
Postproduction: David McNulty
Planner: Amy Whittaker / Nick Emmel
Creative Director: James Cooper
Creative Lead: Eduardo de Felipe
Music: Samuel Sim
Voice over: Sean Pertwee

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