Meme Mania as Extra Gum Defies Dull

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We’ve been talking a lot lately about Dull – the scourge of modern advertising and a money pit for marketers because of the huge opportunity costs Dull advertising creates. While entertaining your audience should be a primary concern for advertisers, avoiding Dull is right up there with it. If viewers end up polarised, that’s a lot better than them ending up bored.

That’s a good way to think about our Ad Of The Week this week. It’s the new campaign from Extra Gum and agencies BBDO Chicago and adam&eve\TBWA, “Total Overthink Of The Head”. It’s also a wild, chaotic mash-up of memes, 2000s and 2010s nostalgia, kitschy 80s references, clashing art styles and even a bit of earnest advice from the brand to its young customers.

Behind the mullet sheep and galaxy brains and chill dogs that fill Extra’s ad are the same questions that have plagued young people since long before chewing gum was invented. Does my crush like me too? Am I going to crash out at school? And other problems to which Extra’s advice is just – chew good, and don’t overthink it.

So it’s an ad with heart, and the wider social execution is set to focus on the “Chew Ratings” of tricky social situations. But it’s the in-your-face visual style viewers will notice first. The ad is overloaded with cultural references from the second a mulleted sheep starts playing the classic Bonnie Tyler “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” tune on a piano. Wrigley’s and Extra Gum know that in tough and confusing times young audiences are reaching for nostalgia, even with a heavy layer of meme-culture irony on top. If you’re not in on the joke, it’s a confusing, possibly even offputting 90 seconds.

And that’s fine. Because even though a look at the Test Your Ad Trace will tell you there’s some negative feeling sitting alongside the happiness and surprise, the “neutral” part of the emotional chart gets squeezed very thin. You might enjoy the meme overload and the borrowed nostalgia, or you might not get the point, but this ad is certainly not Dull.

That shows up in the Test Your Ad results in the ad’s exceptional Spike Rating, which predicts the short-term sales boosts the ad can generate. The ad also scores exceptionally well on Emotional Intensity, a key component of the Spike score and one that shows how good this ad is at getting a response – positive or not. And the ad’s strongly branded too, with a 91% Fluency score, several points above the category norm.

Most ads which use cultural references tend to look back further than Extra Gum and focus on one or two nostalgic elements. By throwing out the rulebook and confronting viewers with a whole menagerie of memes, all brought to life by animation, the brand has made nostalgia exciting and funny rather than cosy. It’s created an ad that avoids Dull and is set to deliver sales impact.