Love happens here

I’ll be doing some traveling during Christmas week. I’ll visit my sisters for Christmas day. Then a couple days after that I’ll head to Kentucky to visit my brother and his family until New Year’s Eve. All that travel means I probably won’t post much over the next week.

It also means I won’t be able to go to the Detroit Film Theater to watch the British Arrows. So I watched them online at home.

The British Arrows are awards for the best commercials created by the British advertising industry. I don’t watch much television and one reason is the ads. So it is strange that I would watch a whole show made up of only ads. But these are British ads with a very different point of view. Some are provocative and some are full of a British sense of humor. You can watch all of the 2018 award recipients here. It will take a while – there are 20 bronze winners, 14 silver winners, 21 gold winners, and a couple special mentions. Some are short – 30 seconds to 1½ minutes. Many are 2 minutes or so, a few are 5-10 minutes. So in a theater where they are shown one after another it is a full evening.

Here are some of my favorites:

Bronze arrows

Love happens here. There had been a poster campaign around London briefly describing hate crimes against LGBT people. The purpose was to show hate happens in the city. The campaign then switched to showing that love happens in London too. They featured real stories of love and acceptance in both posters and TV spots.

Mars Petcare has a commercial in which a cat befriends a chick.

Edeka supermarkets has a commercial of a time after a technology takeover when a young robot goes searching for humans. It was cool, but I don’t know what it has to do with promoting a supermarket chain.

A video for the site on-running.com told the story of a running coach who worked with refugees to give them a sense of togetherness, and purpose. A Refugee Team even went to the Olympics.

A couple of Silver Arrow winners just for fun.

A company that makes dishwasher detergent created I Love Doing Dishes.

Epic Lift which is fun, but hard to describe.

Gold arrows

Warburtons breads created Pride and Breadjudice where the heroine falls for the baker.

The BBC and its CBeebies channel asked several pairs of kids (frequently one non-white) and asked them what was the differences between them. The kids are either puzzled by the question or come up with an answer that was never about race.

Marmite is a yeast extract that some British (and some Australians) spread on toast. One either loves it or hates it. Because of its reputation I never tried it. The commercial envisions a gene test that determines whether a person is a lover or a hater (of Marmite). People are shown receiving their test results with awkward scenes where they come out to other family members.

A top award went to The Talk in which black parents talk to their children about racism. It’s time there was more discussion about the talk so it didn’t need to happen.