You know, we pitched for the Morrisons' account in late 2006; before my time. This means I can handily use the Blairish ‘it was the previous administration' to disinterestedly say that if we had won, I doubt that Greg Delaney (chairman of winning agency DLKW) would be writing an Adwatch of the Year comment on the work we created.
Don't get me wrong: I faintly remember the campaign we pitched with as being terribly charming, well thought-through and far from embarrassing - which is a pretty good start for any pitch, don't you think?
But we didn't win; the lovely DLKW chaps did, and went on to produce a campaign for the bright yellow supermarket chain that has picked up all sorts of fancy marketing awards, got to the top of the Adwatch chart time after time and, far more importantly, helped drive what is affectionately known in the business as a bit of a turnaround.
A fair question at this point would be ‘How?'
As executions go, this kind of thing is far from my cup of tea. I mean, let's be brutal: the ads aren't going to create a huge amount of passionate debate among the traditional advertising awards juries.
However much that Hamster bloke from that Top Gear TV programme supposedly gets the housewives of Great Britain all frisky, the sight of him stiffly pushing a trolley around isn't going to get advertising bosses demanding ‘A Morrisons' from their painfully fashionable Shoreditch creative teams, is it?
That's not the point, though. Sometimes the simplest and most obvious of creative vehicles can have the greatest clarity of thought at work in the background. There is a strategy pulling hard here, a positioning of ‘market freshness' that is so true to the brand that fancy creative would pointlessly obfuscate and be a waste of time and marketing sweat. (‘Marketing sweat'?
Now that's an unpleasant turn of phrase I promise never to use again.)
At its most basic, what DLKW has come up with is a very clean, celebrity-based campaign that features - quite deliberately, I'm sure - the most accessible of Blisters quite calmly talking through the brief while Take That warble harmlessly in the background. No big executional idea to get, no fancy render to see through, just a very effective advertising campaign that has the confidence to allow the reward to be the message, rather than the messenger.
That'll be why it's number one in the Adwatch of the Year.
Happy Christmas, one and all.