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Disney is advertising's forgotten love child. Resented, ignored, always there on TV, but somehow airbrushed out of the business consciousness. This is largely, I suspect, because the ads never seem to change. Disney is Disney, after all. This work is as you would expect: magic moments from start to finish. Strangely, the one thing it really lacks is magic.

Visually there are no surprises, but there's an angle in the voiceover. It is not one that is likely to endear Disney to the new parents it seeks to engage, however. It blatantly reminds them that their kids will leave home before they know it, so they had better be quick and take them to Disney before it's too late.

Well, cheers for that. Nothing like a bucket of ice-cold honesty as a heavy-handed sales technique.

I went to Disney last October. And the October three years before that. For me, the Disney World in Florida is one of the most spellbinding places on earth.

The sheer extravagant attention to detail left me breathless. The anticipation as you walk up to the main gate of the parks is enough to leave you dry-mouthed. You feel that something epic is about to happen. It is all so beautifully stage-managed.

The parks, all of them, are dazzling in their scale and completeness. There are no joins to be seen, no slip-ups, no peeling paint to jolt you back to reality. It is as thorough an alternative universe as you'll ever visit.

I went convinced that I would hate it, and I was won over in 15 minutes.

The Disney World I visited can not be seen in its advertising. It looks similar, but the joy, spectacle, thrill, depth of imagination and fantastical otherworldliness are all absent.

There are smiling faces, but I don't believe them.

Disney really does make your jaw drop, every day, a thousand times over; but the ads presume you know all that already. Magic is an overused word, but Disney has it in abundance. Not the deflated magic of the ads: the real, three-dimensional variety.

Disney advertising has become limp and invisible - too easy to mentally screen out.

This, surely, represents a yawning opportunity. Walt Disney, the man, had vision, and it is time that the advertising of Disney, the brand, matched that ambition.

I would love to see a Disney World ad that really was as epic as the place itself, and inspiring enough to make the doubters and cynics question their judgement.

Perhaps this is one of those products that will always be bigger and better than any ad can portray. But if you could show what it feels like, rather than just what it looks like, then viewers' own imagination will magnify it beyond the bounds of any TV screen.

We spend most of our careers promoting products that don't live up to the advertising. In this instance, it is the other way around.

Brand strategy verdict: 3 out of 10

A blunt instrument, lacking the wonder that should be mandatory for a company like Disney. There is so much more to play for.