The 30 best ads from Campaign Brief’s 30 years. 2011: Office of Road Safety ‘Enjoy The Ride’

Campaign Brief WA turns 30 this month, so over the thirty days of June we’re looking back and choosing the best ad done in each of our 30 years.

The long-prevailing view of creatives is that the worth of an ad is determined by the strength of the underlying idea.

303Lowe’s Enjoy The Ride for the Office of Road Safety is the ultimate expression of that – it’s all about the idea.

The ad itself, created by Dav Tabeshfar and Richard Bermey, is actually pretty ordinary. OK – Tabeshfar’s script is very good and perfectly delivered by renowned actor David Wenham, but the actual execution is nothing startling.

The idea though is so seductive, so appealing, so insightful, it doesn’t matter.

The campaign launched on all three commercial TV channels in the same ad break. Unfortunately, that was just about the first and last time the Office of Road Safety could afford to run the three-minute epic.

If you haven’t watched it for a while, do so now. It’s worth being reminded of what a great idea this is and how it applies to all of us.

There were two other very fine pieces from 2011.

Ad Impact bobbed up again with a press ad for Midalia Steel. ‘Pool Fence’ by Mark Mcdonald and Neil Martin was a ripper, placed in the Births section of the paper. Very clever.

For the life of us, we can’t understand why Marketforce’s ‘Horsepower’ TVC for the South Australian Dept. of Energy & Infrastructure didn’t do better award-wise around the world – including in Perth. It’s a beautifully made TVC – especially considering it was made on a very modest budget – and got a couple of gongs for craft, including Grant Sputore’s Direction, but not much else.

Perhaps it was a bit over-wrought for award judges who might have thought the idea was over-played. In Victoria, McCann Erickson took a completely different tack on the subject and look what happened. But to us, Horsepower is still one of the better TVCs ever made here.