Walker’s Bring You The Crisp’s Eye View

Walker’s Bring You The Crisp’s Eye View

4.0

“A Walkers ad WITHOUT the ubiquitous Gary Lineker” said one surprised viewer in response to this commercial. It’s a comment that shows how linked the celebrity and the brand are, and the tricky task which faces Walkers as they continue to move forward with a positioning where Lineker is more of a brand ambassador figure than a star.

This new era of Walkers has got off to a strong start, even if they haven’t yet settled on a recurring creative device to replace the cunning, crisp-craving “Gary” character. We’ve had a Christmas ad with Ladbaby, some strong spots with Asim Chaudhry, and most recently an excellent ad about, of all things, crisp sandwiches. All these scored well or very well on the Test Your Ad platform.

This new ad continues the sequence of successful experiments. It’s a montage of scenes, all filmed from what you might call a crisp’s-eye-view. The inside of a packet in someone’s hands, or open on a pub table, lets us see the happy faces of the people eating Walkers, promoted here as “Britain’s best-loved crisps”.

There’s no story to the ad and not really any incident, so the whole thing stands or falls on whether people enjoy the original perspective. Fortunately they do, and the ad gets a 4.0-Star score, another in the line of good results for Walkers.

A high score here certainly wasn’t a certainty. There have been a few ads for food and drink brands which try this kind of strange perspective trick and they haven’t always been a success – for instance a drinks ad which was filmed as if inside a mouth got a very uneasy response with a lot of disgust in the mix.

Walkers avoid that error by combining their unusual camera angle with lots of very human responses – it’s an ad about the enjoying crisps, not just eating them. They also have a not-so-secret weapon – Madness’ cover of “It Must Be Love” on the soundtrack. A great song can elevate an ad and dramatically increase its effectiveness. At the moment brands are getting a lot of mileage out of the quirky, upbeat sounds of the new wave era, with hits by Tenpole Tudor and Plastic Bertrand also soundtracking high-scoring ads.

An unusual idea, a catchy song, and plenty of smiling faces – it all adds up to another hit for a brand which has a lot of ideas right now and is executing them with confidence and flair.