Have you seen the latest TV commercial foray into surfing? Or should that be the latest surfing foray into TV commercials? Either way Lisa Andersen and her flogging of No. 7 Age-Defying Serum by Boots ain’t all that bad. For one, it features Lisa Andersen so that’s an inherently good thing.
And as far as concept and execution goes it doesn’t want to make you stab yourself in the eye with a Pluto Pup stick, so that’s good too. But does it fit into the pantheon of great surfing commercials? And yes, there is a pantheon.
At the top of the list is the great MR and his Tooheys Ad from 1984. I mean they had me with the catchy lyrics (“With a proud Novocastrian grin, he was the first champ to ride the twin fin”) and the even catchier song. Add the Pipe footage and the signature raised eyebrows and, well, you can see why I still drink New off the back off it 30 years later. How does it feel? Fucking great and thanks for asking.
Next in line comes the classic Nias Coke Ad. Coke had previous, using surfers in their Bruce Brown narrated Hawaiian effort from 1965.
However its early ’90s “Can you tell us where the waves are?” was right, uhm, on point. As a teenager the TV footage of Jodie Cooper screaming through a huge green barrel in her sexy, red one piece bikini caused me so many different, exciting and conflicting emotions I often had to go the bathroom for ten minutes to furiously sort them all out. Even now the thought of Luke Egan’s stylish flick outs, Kye Fitzgerald’s yellow Hot Buttered and Stuart Bedford-Brown’s good looks makes me want to go the shop and buy a bottle of coke. Or at least order one on Amazon.
From sexy red Bikinis we can now segue into pork products. If you’d had the opportunity to read the Aldi’s Christmas Ham script beforehand, you may have thought 100 surfers dressed as Santas, some with fat hams on their nose of their boards would turn out shite. Yet somehow the Glue Factory’s James Dive made it work and turned it into something slightly surreal, but mainly fun. And who doesn’t like ham? Apart from vegetarians and Muslims and my cousin Mick, who is neither.
However in terms of a pantheon we might need to go back to the granddaddy, the big momma and the godfather all surf ads, the Guinness Big Wave Ad. This features, in no particular order, Owl Chapman, massive Pipe, flyaway pullouts, 70’s string bikinis, Guinness and a sexy saxophone solo. How on Earth they found six of my all time favourite things in the world and packaged it into one classic ad is beyond me, but they did. Sorry Lisa, you going to have to up your game next time.
