83
Slowing down or speeding up time can generate a surprising take on a product or issue.
170 / 100 ways to create a great ad
THE EFFECTS OF TIME
01 / New Zealand Road Safety
A life would flash before your eyes if you sped past the images in this New Zealand road safety campaign. 02 / Sony
This ad for a Sony TV showed someone’s life passing in a series of jump cuts. Many ads use the idea of the product outliving the consumer.
Playing with the effects of time can produce interesting executions. The most obvious examples are ads that assert the durability of a product by showing it surviving into the future or outliving the people who bought it. An eighties ad for Sony’s Trinitron TV showed a man on a sofa watching it from birth to death, with his life passing in jump cuts. Playing with time can also be used to tackle subtler messages. A British campaign for Oxfam’s second-hand charity shops showed vintage copies of Vogue magazine with the line ‘Now in’. A campaign for Greenpeace described the extinction of whales from a future perspective. It gave a novel take on a familiar problem.
The notion that your life flashes in front of your eyes before you die has been used in many ads, and one of the most inventive spins on it came from a road safety campaign by Saatchi & Saatchi New Zealand. Billboards showing scenes from a man’s life were placed closely together at the side of the road so that anyone speeding past would see them as a blur of images. The final posters read, ‘Don’t let your life flash before you’ and ‘Slow down’.