Media This article is more than 17 years oldA great paint job - but you missed a bit
This article is more than 17 years oldSometimes the dust needs to settle before you see things clearly. A week and a half after it was first shown on British TV, it's become absolutely clear to me that the new Sony Bravia "Paint" commercial, the most expensive, most hyped, but also most genuinely anticipated commercial of the year, has fallen just short of greatness.
Make no mistake, it's an incredibly striking piece of advertising that's been talked about a lot in advertising circles and probably in the real world too. For the two of you who haven't seen it or downloaded it or read about it or had it described to you, the commercial shows a tower block being splattered from penthouse to pavement by spectacular explosions of multi-coloured paint in a vivid dramatisation of the glorious colour you experience with a Sony Bravia TV. This piece of advertising is a great example of many things that advertising doesn't do enough of. It's beautiful rather than funny. It's intelligently surreal rather than brain-numbingly literal. It's gloriously depopulated rather than strewn with people you're meant to look like or identify with. And it's a proper modern media property not just an ad: first a rumour, then a tease clip sent out on email, then an ad, a site, an online game and a downloadable documentary of the making of.
It's also staggeringly expensive. The word in adland is that the "Paint" commercial cost about £2m to produce, including the cost of relocating residents, 60 people cleaning up paint for five days afterwards and an unprecedentedly large fee for the talented director Jonathan Glazer. Sony and its agency Fallon have taken an idealistic gamble, hoping that a higher production budget will create a strong enough commercial to create a big enough buzz to compensate for a lower media budget. The gamble, one that few advertisers are bold enough to take, has paid off handsomely.
But do all these admirable qualities add up to greatness? For me, not quite. The commercial features the tagline "like no other", but the irony is that the commercial is very much like another. The other was the Sony Bravia commercial from last year. And as good as this one is, the other was better.
Last year, Sony gave us 250,000 rubber balls bouncing down the sloping streets of San Francisco to dramatise the glorious colour of the Bravia. It too was beautiful not funny. It too was intelligently surreal. It too was gloriously depopulated. It too was expensive. But "Balls" had something that "Paint" doesn't have. It had warmth.
The warmth came from a number of things. "Balls" was shot in San Francisco. The setting was sunny, sleepy and glamorous, easy like a Sunday morning. As soon as you saw it you wanted to be there in your sandals, shorts and shades. "Paint" was shot in a housing estate in Glasgow. The setting is overcast, domestic and austere, like one of Andreas Gursky's more miserable photos. You're happy to watch it, but you don't want to be there because you'd need a thick coat, gloves and a Thermos flask.
The warmth came from the details. The only person in the "Balls" commercial is a little kid watching the colourful spectacle in awe. It's slightly cliched, true, but it's also natural and charming. The only person in the new "Paint" commercial is a man running, wearing a clown mask like something from a kids' party, a Stephen King story, or both. It's obscure, self-conscious and ever so slightly disturbing.
And perhaps, most of all, it came from the music. "Balls" was set to a simple, folksy song by José González. Visually, you were in a large city but, acoustically, you were on your front porch listening to a man playing his guitar. The song's intimacy tempered the commercial's size, filled its depopulated streets with a gentle human voice. "Paint", on the other hand is cleverly choreographed to Rossini's Thieving Magpie. Visually, you are in a large housing estate but, acoustically, you are sitting in the Royal Albert Hall. The artistic scale of the music compounds the artistic scale of the commercial, like watching a video installation in the Tate while surrounded by a 104-piece orchestra. It's show-off stuff, and maybe it's me but I don't find it easy to warm to a show-off.
And if this all sounds like semiotic subtlety, it's not. Warmth is the difference between an ad you admire and an ad you take to heart, between an ad you were pleased to have seen and an ad you didn't really want to end. And in the case of two very striking Sony Bravia commercials, warmth is the difference between a very good artifact and a great piece of communication.
Recycle your ads - you know it makes sense
Problem: Sony televisions, like all televisions, are often left on standby consuming way more electricity than is reasonable. Problem: environmental consciousness is sweeping through the nation and electrical items like televisions on standby are close to the line of fire. Problem: with a colossal shoot involving thousands of electrically triggered explosions, dozens of cameras, not to mention catering trucks and taxis, Sony has made an environmentally dubious commercial to sell thousands of their environmentally dubious TV sets.
Solution: Sony recycles its commercial. In a year or so, when the Paint commercial has run its course and a million multicoloured rubber ducks bobbing over Victoria Falls or something for the next execution are being shot, it auctions off the outgoing Paint ad to Dulux or Sanderson or Farrow and Ball. A bidding war ensues, it's sold for a good chunk of its original production costs, say £500k, but what Dulux or Sanderson or Farrow and Ball buy for its £500k is a) easily the best paint commercial that's ever been made, b) a sure-fire hit because it was a hit for Sony, c) instant ad industry fame for being the first firm to legitimately recycle an ad and d) instant credibility for its super-green multicoloured acquisition.
What Sony gets is a) a pile of cash, b) the chance to use that pile of cash to buy offsets to compensate for their environmentally dubious TVs and TV ads, c) even better PR than the aforementioned paint companies.
And if Sony chooses to offset by planting fruit trees, say, and if Sony quietly films those fruit trees as they grow, in 10 years' time Sony will have a) a cheap but spectacular new Sony Bravia commercial showing 10 years of multicoloured blossoms opening and closing in time lapse and b) the most popular, admirable and far-sighted advertising property in a globally-overheated and green-obsessed 2016.
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