Can bad advertising save the world?
In a society that is becoming more and more divided each day, Toronto ad agency john st. thinks that humanity’s shared hatred of terrible advertising might be just the thing brings us together.
The ad shop’s latest video, called “Make Humanity Great Again,” is a note-perfect parody of Heineken’s “Worlds Apart” social experiment, except in this case, it’s not beer that gets people talking to each other, but awful ads.
The film, which debuted on Thursday (11/9) at Strategy Magazine’s Agency of the Year show which salutes the best in Canadian advertising, is another in a long line of john st. parodies that started with Pink Ponies: A Case Study, and continued with ExFeariential, Buyral and most recently, Jane St. Director was Taso Alexander of production house Skin & Bones.
“We have this big mural on our wall at john st. that says ‘people hate advertising,’ so the idea for this film kind of came off our wall,” said Angus Tucker, co-ECD of john st.
“No matter who you are or what party you vote for, whether you love guns or hate guns, love dogs or hate dogs–everyone hates the ads where they talk about these weird side effects for 50 seconds,” added Tucker. “We think even Donald Trump and Angela Merkel would look at each other and go ‘I hate these stupid ads.’ So once they can agree on that, then maybe, who knows, they could agree on climate change or something.”
