the grass is greener on the internet

I’ve bitched about advertisers not using the interactive content on facebook to its full potential, but the new Spring Valley campaign is all that and more.

A while back Spring Valley redid their bottles for a more ‘modern’ and fresh look – let’s be honest, it was clean, but boring. Now the bottles have changed again, but this time with an integrated campaign.

Titled ‘save your sensible’, it revolves around the idea that if you listened to your conscience more, or rather your ‘sensible’, you’d drink Spring Valley. So far I’ve seen bus stop ads, some youtube shorts, and their official website.

My favourite part is this video in the website intro:

If you have a visit of the website it has a fully interactive ‘sensible’ which you can feed, throw, or post on your facebook. It’s like the pet application but branded – I like. It’s entertaining, and engages in a way which is relevant to the product. Slightly bemused by the subliminal ‘mm, yum’ sounds you hear as the animation loads though.

I like that instead of appealing to the inner guilt we all have about trying to be healthy, they’ve gone for a humourous, feel-good message. It’s a balance because the guilt is probably more powerful, but it’s also unreliable and doesn’t let you feel good about the product, just resentful. It also allows you to abuse your ‘sensible’ for fun – because they know you will anyway. Interesting…

The ‘sensible’ must have been a tough design decision…what does your conscience look like?

The website intro has it as quite a clean animation, but unfortunately has a passing resemblance to those ghost things in Pacman…you know.

The youtube version as well as the banners bring to mind the words ‘potato’, ‘flobbly’, ‘wormy’ and ‘squelchy’. Now nobody expects their conscience to be pretty, but nobody listens to phlegm. (If it doesn’t look good, and it drinks Spring Valley, what does that say?) The funny thing is that it does have a slight cute factor, especially with its facial expressions and the occasional colour change.

The actual animation on the website (and Facebook, I assume) has quite poor rendering, which was disappointing. But I guess that’s the compromise you make for real-time interaction, and you can do quite a lot with the animation. It never stops moving (or making sounds, which was a bit annoying). There was also quite an obvious dog reference with the ‘sensible’ being eager, panting, blinking, growling and wagging its flobbly tail. There’s also plenty of positive reinforcement potential for when you get sick of poking the poor thing and feed it some juice.

All three versions are noticeably different even though they tie together the same concept, so I’m wondering whether it was a matter of different creatives…

I love the concept and it’s been done quite well – I think it might just have enough of that kitsch factor to be able to pull it off. It’s all about the tipping point. We’ll wait and see…

I think this one works…

Not as sure about this one though…