Valentine’s Day – Love, lust and brand awareness

By Benny Lee (left), digital creative, Atomic 212

I took my girlfriend to Burger King one fateful 14th of February. The following day, after dining at a Michelin starred restaurant, and being substantially poorer, I was out of the proverbial doghouse.

I learnt a very important lesson that day: February 14th is Valentine’s Day and to ensure you don’t sleep on the floor that night, just buy the damn roses.

Is it fair? No. Is Valentine’s Day a scam of a holiday designed to sell flowers and jewellery? Maybe. I think it’s clear by this point that I don’t enjoy paying for overpriced flowers that coincidentally are marked up by a couple hundred percent. Could this be the reason that I’m going to be celebrating Single’s Awareness Day rather than Valentine’s next Tuesday? Yeah… Probably.

So this year, instead of frantically making dining reservations, I decided to put together a list of creative campaigns that tugged at heartstrings or were just dope AF.

Google ‘Parisian Love‘

If you have ridiculous amounts of money at your disposal, you can afford to be loud, brash and the centre of attention; but just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should.

This is the approach Google had back in 2010 with their Super Bowl ad. Every other company was spending countless millions on creative with celebrities and crazy CGI on our industry’s greatest stage. Yet Google rocked up with an ad that you could recreate on the computer you’re reading this on.

An entire love story is told via a series of Google searches that’s designed to make you go “Awww”.

It reinforces the importance of a great story. You don’t need Yeezy or the Kardashians when you’ve got a fantastic script.

Chanel N°5 ‘Marilyn and N°5‘

I’m not hating on celebrity endorsements, because they can work. Especially if they’re free. Chanel was fortunate enough to have score one of the best brand endorsements ever, and they didn’t pay a cent. One of the most iconic women of the 20th century, Marilyn Monroe, famously wore only “Just a few drops of N°5” to bed.

Chanel finally put Marilyn in one of their ads some 60 years after she made them millions, in a piece of creative that’s elegant, nostalgic and tinged with sadness – we know this love story doesn’t have a happy ending.

Sexy Avenue ‘Shred Your Ex‘

Sexy Avenue sells sex toys. This ad is brilliant.

‘Inseparable’ starts off like your classic ‘boy meets girl, boy loses girl’ but soon you realise this is more bunny boiler rather than rom-com.

Shred Your Ex asked people to send in pictures of their exes, so that photos could be printed and then just as quickly destroyed by a “commercial-grade paper shredder”.

As for the waste paper? “All shreds are donated to a local animal shelter, PAWS4EVER, and used as litter for recently spayed and neutered kittens recovering from surgery.”

Shred Your Ex then had the remnants covered in cat poo.

While this isn’t your classic love story, it was hilarious.

Deadpool

Last year’s R18 blockbuster probably isn’t a romantic, first date sort of movie but it did release on Valentine’s Day. Judging by the sort of posters that were released, you just know someone bought tickets expecting a rom com with a lot of Ryan Reynolds.

There certainly was a lot of Ryan Reynolds, but he looked like “Freddie Kruger face-fucked a topographical map of Utah” (a direct quote from the film) or was wearing a mask for the vast majority of the film.