In its latest idea for Three, Wieden & Kennedy has bent the laws of nature to their degenerate ends in conducting a gruesome vivisection experiment to give birth to an horrific hybrid-being, which has a flamingo’s bottom-half grafted on to a giraffe’s top half.
And it’s terrific.
Their Giraffamingo is a metaphor for the feeling I now don’t have to imagine if I was roaming "60 extra destinations across the world" with my Three data-roaming switched on. "Go roam", as the endline says.
Before the Giraffamingo, Three and Wieden’s introduced us to a wonderful menagerie of other advertising characters. First up there was the cute dancing "Pony," then the adorable girl and her cat ("Sing it kitty"), and then Jackson the lovable puppet who gets knocked down only to get up again and "Make it right".
The Giraffamingo doesn’t tug at our heartstrings like these other advertising characters (although there are some nice details in there like the "snap, chat, post, post, strut" moment exactly to the beat of Salt-N-Pepa’s Shoop).
Giraffamingo also works in a different way from many of the memorable advertising character acts from the Golden Age of British Advertising (for example, Cresta’s polar bear, Hofmeister lager’s George, also a bear, and the Honey Monster – all John Webster’s offspring).
Giraffamingo aims, and succeeds, I think, in delivering memorable relevance rather than just settling for memorable silliness.
Mentioning the late, great, John Webster reminds me of Sarah Carter’s reminiscence that someone once joked that it wasn’t so important whether Webster’s campaigns had "legs", just as long as they had four and they were hairy.
In adding pink plumes, wings, a preposterously long neck, and those ridiculous flamingo legs, Wieden’s has demonstrated that they know the Law Of The Advertising Furries well enough to give it a fresh twist.
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