This spot for Boag’s Draught won best-in-show for television at the Clio Awards this week.
Slate’s Seth Stevenson is not impressed. He calls the spot “a lame joke tarted up with decent CGI.”
The visual effects here are impressively seamless, and I enjoyed the sly Aussie wit–most evident in the moment when a man dunks his wife, hoping someone better might pop out of the water. But it’s hard for me to understand why the judges felt this commercial stood head and shoulders above the rest of this year’s entrants.
It’s not like this spot presents an innovative new model–something we’ve never seen before. It’s an exaggerated graphic demonstration of a product benefit, conveying to us the extreme wonderfulness of the Tasmanian water used in the beer’s brewing process. We’ve seen this construct in hundreds upon hundreds of previous TV commercials.
It goes without saying that awards shows have a ton of built-in flaws, like cronyism, subjectivity and increasingly, irrelevance.
