1. Snickers Number One Fantasy (2017)

An ad that goes hard

It’s complicated to work in advertising because most ads are bad.

But this is a newsletter about the other, rarer type of ad.

The type of ad that says something true about what it means to be alive.

The type of Ad that Goes Hard™.

This first one is from Snickers. It ran during the Super Bowl in 2017.

It goes hard because the world’s full of people who love their families and jobs. Yet, in a moment of weakness, fantasise about walking away from it all.

Because for many of us (mostly men), the idea of burning everything to the ground is still more appealing than addressing why you have an anxious feeling in your tummy at night.

So we soothe ourselves by mentally writing weirdly specific packing lists (merino underwear = lighter + wicks moisture) of the bare essentials we need to get us out of this life and on to a destiny so fictional and sparse on detail that we may actually, finally be able to control it.

Highlights:

• Distraught look on the whiteboard guy’s face when he realise emotions are being expressed (00:19)

• “David Johnson. Good. That’s good.” (00:20)