Dock your Alliteration Allowance

I love a little alliteration. Assonance has a certain resonance, too. But it can easily be taken too far - either by just coming across too student-y, or sacrificing meaning for artistry.

Take this ad for Nurofen as an example. The text tells you it gets to work in 10 minutes.

But travelling from Heathrow to Regent's Park via tube (where the advert is being placed) takes nearly an hour. In their desperation to find Hs and Rs, they've completely obscured the point of the advert. If I took nurofen at Heathrow and was only getting relief by Regent's Park, I'd be pretty disappointed in the product.

Evian's counter-intuitive art direction

Companies so often get the ads in the corridors of Oxford Circus station so badly wrong. They always fail to realise that customers just sweep past them close by, propelled in a near-stampede of rushing bodies. Yet some of these brands put extensive text on their ads, irregardless of the hold up and possible assault caused by anyone actually stopping to read them.

The exceptions are the clothes brands whose shops greet you when you reach the surface - H&M, Top Shop, Gap, Uniqlo - who use simple branding and large, attractive pictures to say "make sure you visit US". Here's a typical example (it's from Berlin, but the art direction is the same):

So it was nice today to see Evian using the space intelligently and deliberately aping the clothes stores' style to attract attention. The disconnect between the art direction and the product, in this particular position, created enough cognitive dissonance to make me think consciously about the advert - which is a good deal more than half the challenge in these situations.

Of course, I'll just buy whatever bottled water is cheapest and then fill that bottle up with tap water until I need to buy a new one. I'm not a fucking moron. But it's a good try.

A quick bit of genius to share

Found in an interview with Dave Trott; one of his favourite adverts:

It's so simple, but it actually takes a while for its genius to sink in fully. The "by tube" pun. The fact it ends at Pimlico (the station shown on the tube of paint). The immediate visual schemas for "art" and "London".

And if that isn't enough fun, you could try looking at where the Jubilee line ends and try to work out what year this might have been produced...