Classic Ads From Simpler Times

I’m afraid you’re going to have to indulge us in another BBH-John Hegarty fan club swoon type of thing this week. We’d had decided to give BBH a bit of a swerve for a while but recent events made a review of this ad pertinent so let's put away the wobbly lips and jog on shall we?Buy a ticket on this week’s fun bus and you’ll be part of the discussion about what Levis want in their ads where we discover that unsurprisingly its America and arse shots in that order.Tones mines a rich vein of personal experience to talk about casting bum doubles before revealing a hitherto undiscovered ability to be discreet and there’s a bit of chit-chat about rodent eating as a PR strategy.It's 1985 and Tony’s watching Grange Hill, desperately trying to make sure he doesn’t catch girl germs and BMXing with his mates… whilst I’m discovering fashion and loose underwear in-between hangovers.More importantly Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are installing nuclear weapons in Berkshire and this forces the agency of the decade to hire a pretty boy, take him back to the 1960s and then force him to act in a 60 second soft core porn movie for teenage girls…in the process creating an ad so successful that the client demanded that it was taken off air. Have a listen as we review the only ad ever to feature as talent a man who turned down Kate Moss for that bird that worked with Terry Christian on The Word and have a loo at the ad here https://youtu.be/G1c-bfv2sds.

Welcome to a tiny-weeny bonus bit of Classic Ads from Simpler Times.We’ve reviewed quite a few ads on the pod now so it seemed like as good a time as any to have a quick look at what we loved and what we didn’t and to create a hit parade of the top 20.Of course once we looked at the top 20, a couple of glaring errors became obvious…so we changed them around.You probably won’t agree with the list, ten minutes after we’d finished it Tony didn’t either, but there’s lots more important stuff for us to be dealing with. For instance, we seriously need to get to the bottom of why all the cheese in Coles is now named after porn video categories. Vintage, Natural, Hard, Semi-hard, Mature, and of course, that perennial favourite Blue Vein.Anyway. Enjoy the list of the top 20 ads. Then the argument about the list. Then the new list.

This week the pod takes a slightly different format to the usual assault on your credulity. All will become clear as you do the listening thing.In the year that Bonn Scott drank himself to death, Kleenex went to a remote Scottish island to make a TV advert with an adult grizzly bear as the talent. The bear escaped. Of course it did, 1984 was that kind of year.Join as we have a chat about a KitKat ad that features Captain Alberto Bertorelli, a Connect 4 ad of unknown provenance and the ad voted the UK’s 18th favourite in a poll that Tony mocks every time it’s mentioned.Oh, there's a quiz as well. And Tony sings. Basically more of the usual bollox.Join us as we let you gaze in horror at the advertising that’s stuck with us like holy on the Pope. One features a spiv-like character about to rip-off a load of kids who’re desperate to get into the music industry and the other stars a chainsmoking housewife with a really smelly dog whose idea of fun is to drop a pinger and do the vacuuming.Have a look here https://youtu.be/kZXl_FBUfpQ and be more kinder whydontcha.

Any time there’s a temptation to take this whole podcast lark a bit seriously we'll just play a loop of Jason Ayers saying “When you asked me to do this I didn’t put much thought into it.” That’ll give us a bit of perspective.Jason's the founder and CEO of Sector 5, the Asia Pacific’s foremost Executive Search business for advertising agencies and their clients. The team at Classic Ads Towers were on a Zoom call with Jason (who lives in Tokyo) and thought it'd be great to get him to tell us about his favourite ad, because, you know, he's in the business and all that.So this episode is a quick review of Jason’s favourite advert. It’s bound to be a work of creative genius right? A showcase of the best Japan’s advertising industry has to offer? Well you be the judge…It's all in the sombrero apparently.Have a look at the ad here...https://youtu.be/yLq0YyzLXcU

Thanks for joining us again as we continue our mission of making it impossible for you to underestimate us. This week on the pod Tony’s Uber passenger rating raises its ugly head before we segue into me having a generic old man ranting at the clouds session about exotic birds parrots in ride-sharing vehicles.We meander down memory lane, swerving the white dogshit and that bloke your parents called uncle who spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get you to come and have a look at the train set in his shed… to find out how Tones vandalised his Mum’s car with the cigarette lighter before not being allowed in the monkey enclosure at Dudley Wildlife Park because the family Ford Escort had velour seats.And if you stick with it you’ll hear as a veteran fisherman gets in touch and leaves us a personal message for inclusion in this episode where we review the John West TV commercial voted as the UK’s funniest telly ad…ever.Yes, the love child of Worzel Gummidge and Tony’s Dad joins the list of celebs who’re now using the world’s foremost podcast about old ads and paedophile celebrities as a platform to amplify their media profile, after Enya and Wolf Kahler, the original John West now gets on the blower to reveal himself to be a cuddly old chap deeply committed to the use of pilchard juice as an aphrodisiac and hell-bent on raping the ocean of all suitable fish-based protein.So join shit advertising suit Steve Cooke and award-winning advertising creative and TV commercial director Tony Williams as we take a look at a TV ad featuring a bloke in a bear suit with Bob the Builder as the voiceover talent.Have a look at the advert on our YouTube channel here https://youtu.be/rj4T-cZKbB8 and also as promised, here's the link to the most Australia video ever...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIRT7lf8byw

This episode is recorded live in Tony's kitchen here in sunny Perth, Western Australia, where the time is 20 past 1987 and we’ve just been dropped back into a mini-lockdown because some bellend from Melbourne got Covid then went for a chicken parmi in Kardinya before dropping in at Coles so he could fuck up a long weekend for 2.8 million people.UK listeners probably have little sympathy over a mere three day lockdown when they haven’t been outside since April last year, but let’s be honest, if you live in Britain you probably don’t want to go outside anyway when the entire place is ankle-deep in litter and smells like a tramps arse most of the time.Anyway… join has-been advertising suit Steve Cooke, and Mount Lawley’s premier noodle expert and TV commercial director Tony Williams as we explain how Colonel Dietrich got a face transplant, before moving on to find out whether Tones would leave Jennifer Aniston for Angelina Jolie, how long it takes to train a crack squad of squirrels to crack nuts and whether the leader of the Mujahadeen Brigades has a future in advertising.This is the episode where Tony reveals that his cold, shriveled heart has no room in it for even one of the 250,000 colourful bouncing balls used in today’s ad for Sony’s Bravia TVs.The levels of downbeat on display from Western Australia’s foremost Jimmy Saville impersonator will remind some of our listener of the Lego Kipper ad where the absence of Tommy Cooper led to Tony sitting in the studio for an hour and a half displaying the face he usually reserves for a difficult poo.Yes, Tony’s an absolute fun sponge in this one. Behaving like a man from a near future where happiness has been banned and everyone has to walk to work in bare feet over paths strewn with Lego… but for you and I it’s 2005, 100 million people in Indonesia are sat in the dark, devastated because they can’t watch Ken Barlow getting married again, and more importantly, Fallon London is about to get a Gold lion at Cannes after buying every ball in the contiguous United States.Enjoy the show and have a look at the Sony ad on our YouTube channel here https://youtu.be/-MzEuJKjc3I