Why the new Ding Dong ad works

I have a bone to pick with my brethren from the ad world. Somewhere along the way, we took the whole ‘jaded advertiser’ thing a little too seriously. I mean, come on. Is it really necessary to hate every thing with such vigor and passion? Case in point, the ‘new’ Ding Dong... uh... I’m not sure what I should call it. Jingle? Ad? Song? Story? The thing cuts into way too many territories.

A quick survey of the Super Rational World of Useless Commenters, these days known as Facebook, will reveal the usual suspects up to their usual whining. You’ve got the typical armchair experts being their breaker-downer self, talking about the multi-faceted fails of the advert including allegedly substandard lyrics, music, and animation. I love it that the internet is just bursting at the seams with these experts. Never having made anything themselves, they are the quickest to jump into the blame game and offer criticism on pretty much any and everything. Though I haven’t gotten in touch with Guinness yet, but I’m pretty sure the claims for this being the 'worst' jingle ever are a teeny tiny bit exaggerated.

Here’s the thing: Ding Dong ads always were always pretty tacky to begin with. But it’s okay, because they got the job done. You know why? Cuz they’re not out to make the next big advertising masterpiece. They just want to move product. And this ridiculous ripoff of Felix the Cat has proven to be an especially effective tool for them to inch ever closer towards that goal. Word on the street is that a truck full of Ding Dong bubble is as liquid on the open market as cash.

Subsequently, every such 'iconic' Ding Dong jingle must have seemed quite mediocre to Super Rational World of Useless Commenters of each era that it was released. Fortunately for them, none of these whiners make much of a difference to the one thing that matters for a brand like Ding Dong: the bottom line. The brand makes it bread and butter from kids, and the kids lap up the jingle like... well, kids at a candy shop.

They have tried to update the music to a more modern feel in line with the current electronica inspired vibes you’d hear everywhere. While I do agree that it sounds like a MIDI file from the early 2000s at some points, the effort is commendable. The sound has a steady beat with a thicker bass line that is arguably more appealing to the kid of today, who is exposed to more musical compositions of this kind rather than the more instrumental variants of the same jingle which have been used since time immemorial. I suspect that everybody that is claiming that the music sucks is basically towing the same line when oldies compare today’s electronic pop with classic rock and claim that it's mere noise. Despite this, today’s music sells... to today’s youth. Same’s the case here.

Granted, the animation is not the best in the world. But does it really need to be? It’s so much better than the other Pakistani animated adverts we have to ignore on TV. It’s modern, smooth, illustrative and vibrant. Just about everything that would appeal to... surprise, surprise... the kid who is in their target audience!

And once you stop thinking of it as an advertisement and start looking at it as the branded entertainment option that it’s intended to be, the entire sequence doesn’t seem as abnormally long. Like previous iterations of the commercial, it’s not just an ad that’s supposed to run in conjunction with separate episodes. This time around, and I’m speculating here, they opted to create the entire storyline in jingle form. Sure, it gets repetitive and annoying and rhyming out the whole damn story results in some really iffy compromises in terms of word choice, but they get a whopping 215 seconds to imprint the infectious jingle in the minds of their audiences, no matter how ravaging it may be to your ear canals. The pauses are intentional and serve as focusing points in the visual execution of the story. Once you change your lens from 'jingle' to 'content', I’m sure the entire campaign will appear smarter than we, the almighty nitpickers, give it credit for.