Explanation lifted from another site.
My favourite campaign – Harry the Spider passes prickle-effect acid test Cadbury didn’t have to work hard at all to grab my attention when I was a child. After all, their ads were for my favourite substance – chocolate.
In the ’60s and ’70s, Cadbury’s ads were ubiquitous and famous. The jingles are super glued onto my memory.
You can’t forget “a finger of fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat” or “everyone’s a fruit and nut case, crazy for those Cadbury nuts and raisins”.
But the ultimate Cadbury ad, which still makes my eyes prickle with pleasure, was the ones with Harry the Spider for Cadbury’s Chocolate Fingers.
Cadbury’s fingers are a gift of a brand. Any agency should be shot if they could not produce a great ad with this client, but this is the one that has lingered.
A charming, freckled lad, with a broad toothy grin is listing all the events that he celebrates by eating Cadbury Fingers – birthdays, school holidays and Easter.
In the final shot, he shoots a wicked smile at the camera, slides open a matchbox and announces that today he is eating Cadbury’s Fingers to celebrate Harry the Spider’s coming out party (with no double entendre in the ’70s).
Although you never hear them, you can feel his mum and sisters screaming at the huge pet spider he has living in thematchbox.
It’s a triumph of casting and a brilliant, economical script.
I suspect that for most of us there is a golden age of ads happening somewhere between our childhood and teenage years, and with a child’s faultless memory for the trivial we can call up those ads decades later.
I can still sing the complete Stardrops jingle… “The household cleaner, concentrated too, a few drops does your washing up and shines your house like new.
Stardrops, Stardrops!” Most of these ads were mundane and seem to be for household cleaners.
But when it comes to great ads they have to pass an acid test, they have to make my eyes prickle – tears or laughter, a great ad has to have the “prickle” effect every time I see it.
It is still a real pleasure when I see a new ad that succeeds in generating the prickle.
Alison Payne is planning director at Craik Jones
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