Danette’s High-energy Ad is a Pop Culture Celebration

Our Ad Of The Week comes from France – a chaotic, funny and fast-moving ad from dessert brand Danette and agency BETC that finds a way to celebrate the brand’s decades-long legacy without feeling at all retro.

We know that cultural references are one of the elements that make an ad entertaining and effective. By reminding viewers of a wider context around the brand, they draw the attention of the right hemisphere of the brain, which notices context and relationships and is associated with greater long term effectiveness for ads. (For more on cultural references, check out Orlando Wood’s book Lemon)

So what happens when you fill an ad with not just one or two but half a dozen cultural references?

In “Top Of The Pop”, Danette offers viewers a barrage of nods to pop culture, bringing in everything from Rabbids to Teletubbies across a dozen clips in 30 seconds. Every character, meme, or athlete used is standing up for Danette, a nod to the brand’s classic earlier slogan and campaigns. The choice of cultural references deliberately spans generations, to show how the brand has been eaten and enjoyed by French families for decades.

And it’s all wrapped up in one of the most prominent cultural references of all, the surf-rock classic “Surfin’ Bird”, itself used in multiple shows and movies from the 70s to the 21st Century. The dynamic song works brilliantly to tie together all the different scenes and ideas, giving a rhythm to the apparently random montage and making the whole thing more upbeat and entertaining.

On our Test Your Ad platform, “Top Of The Pop” gets a strong 4.0-Star Rating and also picks up a Strong performance on short-term Spike Rating, predicting share and sales gain respectively. In effectiveness terms that puts it well ahead of the French video norm on both measures, and its 90% Brand Fluency rating is well over the average too (only 10% of viewers don’t come away knowing it’s for Danette).

Rather than directly talk about their years of success and strong presence in French homes, Danette have chosen to remind people of little things that entertained them in those years, from viral videos to cute animals, and linked the brand to that history by reminding viewers of its creative consistency. It’s an ad that proves you can be a household-name brand with a strong legacy and still make highly entertaining work that feels fresh.