Do the eyebrows have it?

AD BREAKDOWN The Magazine's review of advertising

THE ADVERT: Cadbury's eyebrow children

THE SCHTICK: Get an advert which will have the same impact as the infamous drumming gorilla

THE BREAKDOWN: Two awkward-looking children do clever tricks with their eyebrows in time to Freestyle's 1986 tune Don't Stop the Rock.

New gorillas

Cast your mind back to the gorilla drumming his way through Phil Collins' In the Air Tonight. You probably saw it on telly. Maybe on YouTube. It probably made you feel a bit curious, you may have wanted to join in as the simian beast reached his climax, and you probably wondered if it was actually a trained monkey or a man in a suit. You might or might not have noticed it was for Cadbury's chocolate, and if you did, you might also have wondered why a drumming gorilla should make you want to buy chocolate.

Good thoughts, and the correct responses are: yes, it was intriguing; yes, it did make you want to join in; it was a man in a suit; yes, it was for Cadbury's, and it might have been coincidence but chocolate sales went up after the advert.

What made the advert great for Cadbury's is what lots of advertisers will be looking for in these straitened times - getting an advert to "cut through" all the rest of the advertising noise, get it noticed, get people sending it round to each other on the internet, get it accepted as a cult classic - anything to make the advertising pound stretch as far as possible. And all this on top of the standing requirement that people should want to rewind the advert and watch it again and again.

Cadbury's has obviously studied these requirements carefully and thinks with its dancing eyebrows it has a winner. A spokesman said the ad was designed to "encourage involvement and imitation", and indeed one TV comedy show featured such an imitation last week. As if to make the point, a photo-sharing website offers people tools to add weird eyebrows to their photographs and then have them printed on the side of coffee mugs.

And yet there is clearly the risk of feeling over-manufactured; if an advert develops a cult following it's surely better if it grows organically rather than being planned as part of the campaign. There's a risk of an advertiser hoping just a bit too hard for the public to take an advert to its heart, a bit like someone trying to encourage others to use an affectionate nickname.

The advert has probably done enough already for it to get noticed. But the point of this advertising has been to encourage the notion that these adverts are a treat for the viewer, associated with a celebratory moment of reward, just like chocolate. The drumming gorilla certainly had that quality. But do the eyebrows have it?

THE BLOGGER'S VERDICT: Rob Mortimer, a planner at CheethamBellJWT, says "The ad sets its stall out to be entertainment, so we judge it differently. And in this campaign the benchmark is very very high. The problem seems to be that the tone of the humour doesn't quite fit with the idea. It's trying to be Vic and Bob with serious faces and silly movements, but it just feels too forced and lacks the emotional quality that made Gorilla great. Besides, the joy of Gorilla was that you felt the joy of the moment even if you didn't understand the message; but here that joy just doesn't hit."

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Ad Breakdown is compiled by Giles Wilson

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