This ad, made by Watson & Lewis, makes you want to cancel all your appointments and book a trip to Italy instantly; beautiful people, beautiful scenery and an atmosphere you want to completely drown in. And although the Martini logo presence is a little dominant, it makes a very nice long form ad. The commercial is made for the Dutch market only. Why make such an international big budget commercial for such a tiny market? The reason is that they are using YouTube for the distribution and thus could allocate the whole media budget to production! Well allocated, we have to say.

A trailer should make you curious and reveal something of a storyline, suspense, action, drama, whatever. This trailer doesn’t really do that for us. However, we’re not the target group (Russian or Eastern European) and have never heard of the ‘Legend of Akhtamar’, nor from ArArAt – an Armenian brandy, with a beautiful name and ditto logo, owned by Pernod Ricard. Professionally though, we did get excited by the announcement of a 15 minute commercial that will be launched January, first and promises to make some interesting long form content. The short film is made by Amsterdam Worldwide. The agency hired some big names to make the project a success; Stephen Hilton wrote the score, ‘the award winning’ Shammasian Brothers directed it and Erwin Olaf (renowned Dutch photographer) shot the print campaign. It also features a handful of actors that are ‘world famous’ in the East. Yet another example of an advertiser that invests in content, rather than media, to tell a heritage based brand story. Recently we saw a similar concept for Martini; a 3 minute film distributed through YouTube, creating an atmosphere that perfectly conveyed the heritage, brand personality and tone of voice of Martini. For brands that want to tell a sophisticated brand story, the future of the 30 second commercial is a branded story, 15 minutes in length, rather than 15 seconds – regardless the picky and time deprived consumer.