You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …
The Product:
Cadbury’s Caramel chocolates
The Promotion:
The Pitch:
You’ll buy whatever a hot woman tells you to buy, even if, in this case, that hot woman’s a rabbit.
I don’t know if you could make this commercial today.
Back when I did an Ad Space on those infamous Carl’s Junior commercials, I talked about the association of delicious food with sexual pleasure, long exploited by advertisers. And this ad is clearly riffing on the idea, with the Cadbury Caramel Bunny having such a seductively sultry voice, enticing body language, and other cartoon critters with hearts floating out of their head, just to objectively confirm the bunny is, indeed, hot.
Thing is, coming out during the 80’s, it would read as firmly tongue-in-cheek. It’s the expected tropes of a sensual, seductive spokeswoman, but applying those tropes to a cartoon rabbit is inherently ridiculous – an attempt at drawing consumers in with humor, rather than genuine sex appeal.
Flashforward to the 2020’s, though, and everyone has the Internet. We all know that sexy flirty cartoon bunny is a lot of people’s very specific fetish. Make this ad today, and even if it’s still playing it tongue-in-cheek for mass audiences, those mass audiences will nevertheless be aware that there’s a ton of folks legitimately getting aroused by this … and may not want to buy a product associated with that.
Especially not when we get to some of the other commercials in this series, which feature other forest critters hiding in bushes to take candid shots of the sexy bunny, or burrowing up from underground to touch the bunny’s but. Then, of course, there’s the ad which tells us some very special Cadbury Caramel’s will have a picture of the bunny inside the wrapper …
