My sister is an amazing cook. She can turn any mixture of ingredients into a great meal, she just has that knack.
Just as in the wrong hands, the most expensive steak in the world can be inedible.
Just as the finest red wine in the world is wasted in a plastic cup.
Execution and treatment are everything.
Basic ingredients can become things of wonder.
The most wonderful raw material can be destroyed without the experience, car and attention to treat them properly.
I really love this track. Much of it has to do with the context of the final scene of Sex Education where I first heard it.
Some of it is to do with the fact I was going through one of two things at that time.
But mostly, it's because the song has the rare power of a deceptive cadence that builds without you realising it, the song is quiet and dreamy and it's only when it ends that you realise that.
Put another way, the execution - the quiet whispery voice, the gentle strings and couple of deft changes of pace really work for me.
After, I discovered this version. I guess it's the original.
Totally different and I can't stand it. Same song, same lyrics, yet one (to me at least) is amazing and the other is meh.
Which goes a long way to reinforce the point that you really don't have a good creative idea until you start to execute it.
So it delivers more than a message, or builds on a so called insight.
It connects.
Just as Sex Education, the truly excellent Netflix show is about much more than the shock value of lots of sex in high school, it's about the confusion of being young (and being old), the thin line between friendship and love, love and lust and tension between being who people expect and who you really are - even though you're still working out who that actually is.
Here are two ads broadly based on the same message - our cars are reliable.
The first, the classic VW ad isn't just about reliability, it's designed to resonate with something specific about the culture of the UK in the 80s. Roughly something to do with female independence, while still connecting with the materialistic aspirations of the time. It's also a story.
The second, less recent, but still a classic Honda, is pure theatre and showmanship.
Both got people talking and generated talk value, with loads of free PR. In very different ways.
Both could have started with same brief - make the car's reliability desirable rather than dull.
The trick is in the execution.
One taps into culture. One tries to create an event.
Just as both these are about dramatising feeling great about saving money.
The first (in my opinion) rewards the viewer, builds theatre and has deft little executional fairy dust (like the Skeletor laugh at the end).
The second is devoid of any flare whatsoever, sorry. It even proves that even a great track can't save a bad ad.
But the same track can transform a good one into a great one...
Our industry still spends millions pre-testing propositions, messages positionings and other abstract concepts that matter far less to the success of marketing communications than the texture of the stuff that actually get's made. Of course, precision in solving the right problems helps, as does delivering the appropriate message, but when you're really competing against Netflix, YouTube, Tick Tock or someone's favourite soap opera, the message is the easiest part.
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