Revealed: Cadbury’s ‘Freida’ commercial created by three NZ agencies and US animators Psyop
The team behind the latest Cadbury Glass And A Half Full Production, ‘Freida’, which first went to air in NZ two weeks ago and has just gone to air in Australia, combines the talents of RAPP NZ, Tribal DDB, DDB NZ and US based animators, Psyop. This is the first Cadbury spot in the series not conceived by Fallon, London.
The team took universally recognised ‘smooth character’, Fred Astaire, and gave his iconic dance routine the unique Cadbury touch to create another joy-filled Cadbury moment.
One of the creatives told CB: “Psyop (who did Coke HappinessFactory) are amazing to work with. We filmed two two dancers tiedtogether to be the front and the back of the cow, then a real
cow and matched all the movements in CG. It took 4 months!”
The spot is currently only running in Australia and New Zealand, but CBunderstands there is high hopes it will go global, depending onconsumer reaction.
59 Comments
Pretty remedial stuff really. Take something that can’t and use CGI so it can.
Babies dancing, Cows tapping, blah blah.
There’s no emotional connection. I didn’t feel happy, didn’t feel inspired, I didn’t feel anything. The great thing about Gorilla was that you felt as though the character was thinking. In this it’s just dancing, and has no personality. Missed opportunity.
money without an idea
Three agencies to come up with this? A very ordinary effort.
Very Lame
it makes me want to eat more chocolate.
Pretty sure a similar idea was done for milk in the UK many years ago using a cow doing tricks with a football with its hooves,
Give me fucking strength, what advertising geniuses racked their brains and shat this out of their collective creative arse holes?
Anchor butter did this 15 years ago in the UK, and it was shit then.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_65_v82GeI&feature=related
It’s a dancing cgi cow, for fucks sake. What next? A talking baby?
Shoot yourself in the face. Immediately.
Low tech man in a gorilla suit beats CGI cow.
NO GOOD – at all! No Idea, no emotion – feels done before. LAME LAME LAME
Can I just flag a problem with the name? Yes, Freida appears to be from the Friesian breed, so that fits nicely. And judging by the fine set of udders, Freida is a cow, so having a girl’s name (although misspelled) would also fit. The problem arises with the rest of the name – because a ‘steer’ is actually a castrated bull. So this would then suggest that Freida was indeed, at one time, a ‘boy’ beast but is now sporting prosthetic udders to perform the show in drag. Hey, which is fine, too. It is, after all, a flawless performance and that to-camera moment on the beat at 30 seconds is just divine! But I guess it’s a case of why let a little old thing like gender get in the way of a good pun on ‘Fred Astaire’? Bad cow pun.
Its called, milking the rich execs for their money and using it to create random shat in the name of advertising.
Less pretension, and a 10th of the cost:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a24l8mNXN5g&feature=related
A complete and udder waste of time?
All I got out of this was that eating chocolate makes you a fat cow.
Aside from the problem that the CGI looks udderly fake, the whole idea is so borningly logical. Where is the creative leap that produced Gorilla?
Maybe Fallon should keep the the creative reins?
Wow. This is bad creative.
Doesn’t make me want to have a chocolate at all.
Instead it make me feel like shooting the frick’in cow and having a steak.
The point here is that this is being promo’d by the production company.
There’s no much sense in tearing strips of the idea, they agency isn’t the one’s looking for a back slap.
I think the animation does make a (small) step forward from previous tap dancing cow animations in that it looks slightly more natural. Whether it was worth the effort is another question. If the animation alone was going to make it work then it’d have to be fantastic. It still looks unnatural in parts.
that is embarassing…..though seems to follow the downward plane of Glass and a half full productions since the awesome gorilla!
Eyebrows, dogs in cars, bancing cows???? All lack the emotion,engagement and uplift of the original – when are those people at Saatchi and Fallon going to ‘fess up to the client that they sold them a brilliant interuption, not an idea or campaign that could sustain the behemoth that is Dairy Milk.
Give it up!
My mum suggested this as an idea to me when I worked on milk. She’s now rightly in a home.
Makes me want to have a shit. Out of sheer boredom and despair.
This is what happens when idiots get a hold of a great agency’s creative idea:
‘Hey, it’s a glass and a half full production. Milk comes from cows, etc’
Fill in the rest yourselves….
If you’d tried this shit on at Fallon you’d be on the first plane back to Auckland.
Muppets.
The idea is dead… expect over a few million views on youtube – job done.
The agency has high hopes that this will go global?
Yep, on every ad blog in London demonstrating what happens when a bunch of fuckwit kiwis get their hands on a great campaign.
Embarrassing.
I agree with all of the above, this ad is fucking awful and everyone involved should be utterly embarrassed.
But I reserve most of my ire for the Cadbury client. I can just imagine the shit mill they put the agencies through to reach such a low point in an otherwise great campaign.
You ultimately ended up up with the drivel you deserve.
While you’re at it, why don’t you move over to Sony and have a pop at turning Colour Like No Other into an utter piece of shite?
You chaps are missing the point.
Clearly dancing cows produce better milk.
Better milk makes better chocolate.
Ergo Cadbury’s chocolate – best tasting chocolate in the world.
“The team took universally recognised ‘smooth character’, Fred Astaire, and gave his iconic dance routine the unique touch of fail to create another joy-filled Cadbury moment.”
Fixed.
Dull, boring, predictable etc etc
However, to try and instantly forget the horrific experience of the first viewing, I watched it again while listening to metal – which was kinda funny
Dairy me.
I wonder how many complaints this will attrack from animal rights advocates that think some actually made a cow dance?
I took a dump this morning that was at least a glass and a half full of pure joy… it also made me feel more like eating chocolate than watching this ad does.
It’s not a glass and a half of milk in Cadbury anymore, but a glass and a half of ‘smoothness’.
What the fuck am I eating now?
Truth in advertising takes another broadside.
Time to complain folk!!!!!
12.09PM Why do you assume the production company are behind this being on the blog? I find no mention of them in the PR release.
There’s no mention of anyone in fact, just a vague ‘one of the creatives’ quote.
Obviously everyone involved is washing their hands.
In fact, I wouldn’t have minded the post house putting this up on the blog, but the cgi is shit aswell.
I’m just embarrassed for the Australia/NZ creative industry as a whole.
1.16PM makes a good point, the clients down here are just nowhere near as brave or imaginative as the UK Cadbury client.
You people may laugh, but it may be a contender in D&AD’s ‘Best use of dancing cow’ category.
Normally I try to be positive, but that was just not very good at all.
Now if they had made the cow do Gene kelly’s roller skate dance routine, then that might have been a bit more entertaining.
As it is though, the cow just never really picks up the steam you wait for it to – it kind of just taps a bit for the whole ad. So much more could have been done with this, it’s a shame.
Perhaps Julius Sumner Miller could be brought back to life…it wouild be better…then again I didn’t mind the old Flake gobbling scene on the window sill ad either…just put the CGI away and shoot something…what about a Gorilla eating a Falke in a man suit.
Job done.
Go home.
Hi there, all you advertising industry humans.
I’m a 3-year-old Jersey standing in a field with my friends and relatives.
We’re all a bit embarrassed by this as well.
CGI or not, that girl is a trollop.
Fancy let your udders dangle all over the place like that on TV…!
Client: “But it’s just a dancing cow?”
Agency: “Yeah, but we’ll get Psyop to do it (the guys who did Coke Happiness Factory) they’ll make it look like it’s got an idea, oh and we’ll get a trip to the US too.
This is terrible stuff.
Loved the gorilla and the eye brows, however, this hasn’t just dropped the ball, it’s kicked it over the fence.
no no no no no…….bring back ‘wouldn’t it be nice if the world was cadbury’
Where are all the old people with good ideas and balls to educate the moronic clients. Death to all under 40 you are all visually illiterate, spineless and not very clever. The real problem is no one has the guts to say the images are crap.
Really a purple flower by some UK wanker yeah right.
Three tossers yawning yeah thats art. Stop pulling your puds. The only answer is, death to all under 40 lightweight front of brain thinkers.
Suck that you oxygen thieves, go read a book!
Holy cow
11:39 is right.
The crux of the problem with a lot of creative work is reference. Rather than reference, and/or be inspired by anything and everything in life, we’ve become more and more blinkered over the past decade or so.
Now it’s ‘cooler’, easier and more expedient to reference, or in some cases, just plain rip off our own immediate industry. Then the focus narrows EVEN further when we try to emulate other ‘award-winning’ work.
We’re becoming like some isolated and stunted race of incestuous pygmies pissing in our own gene pool. We’re in real danger of wiping ourselves out through lack of creative and cultural diversity.
With the help of technology, the punter is ostensibly becoming more like us as we, foolishly, become more like them: less observant, less inspired, and less artful.
Everyone needs to “go read a book”, take photos, overhear a conversation at the supermarket, watch a documentary, listen to good stand-up comedy, listen to unusual music, make music, pick up slang, jargon, tones of voice, symbols, check out random websites on obscure niche topics, doodle, dream, collect, cook, eat, drink, love, travel… anything, in fact, other than produce an interruption for its own sake or place the current client’s logo on some previous irrelevant execution. If we don’t change, it WILL be our own execution.
Is this blog only for cynical pricks?
9:43,
Like it’s any different in the Film / TV / Music industry.
5% are great, unique, inspired creative, the rest is formulaic, post modern self referenced rubbish.
Such is creativity.
Well said 9:43. The internet hasn’t really helped us either. Somehow seems like a lot more unexpected work was produced when we weren’t so connected. It actually made us leave our desk and go find an idea, or at least spend more time in the pub talking about one.
thats one ad i wish i did not do. a junior would not want that on their reel.
No surprise that Cadbury is as good as dead in New Zealand.
Techno Chicken was better – go on watch it AGAIN people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_2_EJogf2A
Techno Dog is better as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaIS7E_B9wQ
Yo 4:28
What do you mean? “You people”.
Even my young kids thought it was lame.
And believe me… they have pretty low standards when it comes to this kind of thing. If you can’t please them with a chocolate ad that’s meant to be fun, you’ve seriously fucked up.
I feel very, very sorry for the cow!
Anonymous #? is right – The message is: That chocoloate makes you as fat as a cow, no matter how much arthritic tap-dancing you do.
I was waiting for a pile of crap to exit its arse at the end.
This is a bit harsh.
Anyone under 40 is a ‘deck’.
This ad is ‘robbush’
And not even a ‘joneur’ would want this on their reel.
For Pete’s sake lads, stop tossing yourselves off and go buy a well overdue blow job. It’s a fucking ad and I haven’t seen many on TV that are much better at the moment. Then again, I normally watch the ABC while smoking my pipe and admiring my carpet slippers after a long relaxing day doing WW2 re-enactments, but their station promo’s are balls.
Wow! What a shit. Wondering how much of each agency has charged to combine their talents to come up with this.
Idea and strategy – 1
Re-skin and scrap someone’s idea – 1
Production – 10
Copied and scrapped from here
I love this ad as soon as i saw it,but then i love cows and i call my good friends cows. LOVE IT LOVE IT LOVE IT
DDB – Dancing Dumb Bos-primigenius!
This reeks of a client driven brief.
Bring back the dogs and the cars. I liked that one.