Every once in a while, a new ad will come on television that is so good, it makes me say: “Wow! That was great! I wish I had thought of that!” The new “Chocobeast” ad for Jell-O Chocolate Mousse Temptations is one of those ads, and it’s really great! It shows a mother and her two young kids (a boy and a girl) sitting in a tent in their front yard, and she’s telling them a campfire horror story about a monster who comes after kids who steal their parents’ Jell-O Chocolate Mousse Temptations desserts; she says: “but you guys have nothing to worry about, right?” and then the father comes up to the tent and roars, and the kids go screaming into the house. It’s really fun! There are really only a handful of ads that are remembered for many years for the right reasons; I think this new Jell-O ad is going to be one of these.
What are some examples of what I’m talking about? Well, how about the Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?” ad for one. Another is the Fedex ad from the late 1970s showing example vignettes of what might have constituted extremely rapid delivery speed expectations for different time periods in the past (i.e.: months/years in the 1770s, weeks in the 1930s, {I think it was supposed to be the 30s when the guy was slamming a mannequin leg on his desk while yelling into a telephone…} etc.) until some big-cheese CEO-type sits at a giant desk making the curt demand into his telephone receiver, “I need it tomorrow.”, and then he hangs up. More recent examples of great, funny ads are the super-villains’ League of Evil fuming over being caught in a bad cell phone contract in an ad for Net-10, and the Sears Optical “Missing Something?” ad where the woman calls a raccoon into her house for the night, thinking it’s her cat or dog, although I don’t think that the line “Missing Something?” is particularly appropriate for that ad.
There are even some great ones that seem to disappear into obscurity almost immediately, like for instance the Dairy Queen ad from a couple of years ago where an elementary school class is having a show and tell day where the kids bring their dads to class to show them all what they do for a living, and they have one dad as a Dairy Queen ice cream guy demonstrating what he does and making ice cream for all the kids, and then they show the other dads, like a frogman and an astronaut or something like that, waiting out in the hall for their turns and saying: “How are we supposed to compete with that?” In a world full of vapid ads where only rarely does one really wonderful idea shine through the static and filler, only one thing is certain: that they will run and rerun the one good ad in an absolute overkill until they beat us over the head with it so much that we will eventually hate it. That’s how I feel now about the Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?” ad. But until they do that, enjoy this one.
Here is a link to the Jell-O Chocolate Mousse Temptations ad (if you haven’t seen it, it’s really worth checking out!):
