Let me preface this piece by saying that I am a big fan of a smart tactical ad. Especially one that makes people smile. With the headlines as they are, we all need a little humour to lighten the load, and if that humour arrives in the shape of a biscuit (or a cake, depending on which side of that famous VAT ruling you happen to sit) then so much the better.
But I had mixed feels when I saw the Jaffa Cakes reprise of the “Full moon, half moon” campaign during the eclipse earlier this month.
On the plus side, it propelled me right back to the heady 90s when I was a graduate planner at Publicis working on the United Biscuits account with the legendary Michael Ellyatt and Becky Barry. I chuckled to myself, remembering how we filled a cupboard with Jaffa Cakes and secretly filmed various people in the agency eating them in decidedly quirky ways. There were the nibblers. There were the dunkers. There were people performing delicate surgery on the orange bit. There was one man who ate all the chocolate off first and then looked faintly ashamed of himself.
Oh, and no one blinked at such tactics back then. Try that today and you’d spend three hours in a conversation about consent forms before anyone got the lid off the box.
That experiment is what sparked the proposition of “A peculiar British obsession” – the way our audience eats Jaffa Cakes in oddly ritualistic ways, a quirk that feels unmistakably British – which in turn led to the original “Full moon, half moon” TV ad. It was a brilliant idea, and the resurrection of it did make me smile.
But there’s another, more worrying side to the latest Jaffa Cakes eclipse work. Especially when you step back and look at the bigger picture. Tango is bringing back its 90s endline: “You know when you’ve been Tango’ed”, while Carlsberg is reincarnating its “If Carlsberg did…” construct. This is in part the result of the wave of nostalgia brands have been indulging in, in order to win over consumers seeking out simpler times and a sense of reassurance and familiarity. Old taglines also provide a creative shorthand at a time when brands are struggling for attention.
Celebrated as these campaigns are, it does make me worry that the industry is running dry on fresh thinking. One revival is a nice idea. Three starts to look more like a trend. At this rate, we will stop holding tissue sessions and start holding séances.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it’s wrong to reincarnate per se. When I was at WCRS, we brought Mr. Kipling back from the dead to reprise his role as master baker (no snickering at the back) precisely because he was best placed to take the helm, and not least because his name was on the box. There were, you might say, exceedingly good reasons.
What does concern me, though, is that bringing back old campaigns seems to be becoming the default. I understand the appeal. Nostalgia is a wonderful drug. These ideas are pre-tested and already famous. It is extremely difficult for a client to say no to a line their mum can already recite (from memory), and it is a great deal easier than starting with a blank page.
But in the age of AI, fresh creativity has never mattered more. If a machine can now produce something perfectly competent and vaguely familiar in about nine seconds, then competent and vaguely familiar is no longer a strategy. Brands need to be different from and better than the rest. And I can’t believe the best solutions for these brands lie only in the past. Taking Jaffa Cakes alone, there were many other ways we could have gone with that brief aside from the obsession route. And who knows where that might have led us. Some of those routes are presumably still sitting in a drawer somewhere, right next to the key to that secret cupboard.
The eclipse itself lasted a couple of minutes. Here’s hoping this trend is similarly short-lived, and that the industry starts to prioritise new ideas once again.
