Last month, I wrote about two ads produced by Fallon—the “Gorilla” ad for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, and the “Cake” ad for the Skoda Fabia. When I wrote that post, it was clear that the Gorilla ad was quite the sensation, attracting the attention of agency planners and YouTube viewers. Since then, Fallon was named Agency of the Year at the 32nd British Television Advertising Awards, Gorilla was named as the Best TV Commercial of the year, and Cake won a Gold award.

Most readers of this blog will have missed my exchange last weekend with UK planner Charles Frith. (See the end of the comment section of this post.) Charles asked if Millward Brown would be willing to Link-test the now famous Gorilla ad for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk (the leading chocolate bar in the UK) and then “put [the ad] through all the amendments that the process might suggest and see the results.” Correct me if I am wrong, Charles, but I suspect you believe significant changes would result?

Tough to tell given the ad has already been Link-tested. TalkingRetail.com reports:

I tend not to watch much TV, but last weekend, when high winds in Utah forced me off the slopes, I found myself browsing through the cable TV channels when the parallel parking ad for the Audi A4 caught my eye. Simple but amusing, it was clearly a direct appeal to the psyche of the potential Audi driver - and it seems I am not alone in believing there is a lot more to the ad than a great stunt.

I received a link to Tom Hopkins’ blog, Random Thoughts and Observations, which includes a couple of posts related to the book A Master Class in Brand Planning: The Timeless Works of Stephen King. I have little doubt that the book is worth reading but what I’m really interested in is Tom’s motivation for gathering such a laundry list of quotes, from King as well as others.

Most of the quotes center around one of two themes: the belief that creativity is not rational but largely due to luck, and that emotion is the overriding determinant of decision making. In the case of the latter, I think Tom is propagating a popular myth that, if taken out of context, could do harm to many brands.

Last week Russell Davies, former global planning director of Nike and former head of planning at Wieden + Kennedy, was a presenter at the DigitalAge Conference in Istanbul. Because some of my friends have spoken highly of Russell’s thinking, I dropped by with MB colleague Joseph Ciprut to hear him speak. Russell did raise some important and challenging issues in his presentation, but some of what I heard made me wonder whether many of his ideas were simply designed to promote creativity at the expense of the media budget.