Kitchen Antics Make Zewa Stand Out

We’re off to Germany for our Ad Of The Week this week, with a commercial that proves – once again – that there are no such things as boring categories. As our Cost Of Dull report showed, if you’re making dull ads, you’re spending money you didn’t need to spend to get a less than optimal effect. Fortunately, making dull ads is always a choice: you never have to create a boring commercial. Just ask consumer tissue brand Essity Zewa.

Zewa’s latest ad for their kitchen rolls takes us into a typical German family kitchen where a father is using a whisk to whip up some pastry dough. As the whisk falls into pieces he suddenly has a bright idea – why not attach the whisk to an electric drill? His daughter, sensing the mess coming up, takes protective measures… Of course, the dad gets the dough everywhere, so it’s time for Zewa to clean things up.

The message of the ad is extremely functional – it’s a good idea to have kitchen paper around to clean up after any accidents. Zewa could have presented this product message in a very plain way. Instead they chose to entertain their viewers, and took the opportunity to show Zewa in the context of a humorous and cheerful family moment.

As our Test Your Ad results show, the result is a commercial that scores well above the German TV average on all our main metrics. Zewa’s ad gets a 4.0-Star Rating, predicting strong potential for long-term brand growth given the right level of investment. (The average German ad scores only 2.4-Stars). What’s more, Zewa gets exceptional short-term Spike Rating, predicting sales, and an excellent 95% Brand Fluency score – audiences definitely know who this is for.

“We’re excited to see our ad perform so strongly in System1’s testing. With high Spike and Fluency scores, it’s doing exactly what drives brand growth, creating emotional impact, reinforcing memory structures, and building mental availability through fluent, distinctive storytelling,” says Gulnaz Meyenburg, Global Marketing & Communication & Innovation Director, Consumer Tissue at Essity.

There’s no sense either that making the ad entertaining has got in the way of Zewa’s practical message. “Useful”, “practical”, “absorbent” and “reliable” all feature in the list of top associations people have with the ad. Avoiding dullness isn’t a trade-off with product messaging; it reinforces that messaging.

The reason the ad works so well is its embrace of humour and human connection. The comical situation of the Dad trying to use a drill to mix dough wouldn’t land so well with viewers without his human connection with his daughter, who knows exactly how this experiment is going to work out. The humour and the humanity go hand in hand to make this ad stand out so much in such an everyday category.