This spot is fun, showing a little girl put the torn-off head of her stuffed horse in her father's bed Godfather-style. It's cute, if a bit of a non-sequitur. But while I like the ad for its audacious silliness, I wonder how much it will help to sell the product: mandarin oranges.
My issue is that since mandarin oranges have nothing whatsoever to do with The Godfather, people may not be likely to remember what product the ad is even for. This idea would work equally well as a joke in an ad for almost any product, so then how does that make us think of Wonderful Halos mandarin oranges? I only remember because I wrote the product's name down in order to make this point in this blog post; otherwise, I wouldn't have remembered it.
I guess there is that scene in The Godfather, Part II where Marlon Brando is running around with his grandson in an orange grove (I think) before having his fatal heart attack, and he makes that silly fake smile out of an inverted orange rind. Maybe they should use that idea instead: show someone, or a group of people, make those orange rind smiles, and then show the oranges. We would always think of oranges after seeing that, so it would work better to advertise for oranges than the horse head, as much as I really like that concept.
Now, I will admit that this ad does have the announcer say: "If you don't have Halos, they don't have Halos," indicating that your children will all become monstrous criminals and vicious, murderous mobsters without mandarin oranges to eat, threatening your life, to tie it all together. (I like it when ads essentially threaten us into buying the product.) But a lot of people watch the ads without the sound these days (thanks to the mute button), so ads really need to work as silent movies now, and they don't print that copy so we can read it.
Here's the Halos Horse Head spot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD_aXmRbrek
