In this series, Squideo has examined the best ways to turn advertising content into gold. Now that we’ve broken down the eight key ingredients, it’s time to dive deep into some examples of stellar advertising. This week, the advert in question was picked by Squideo’s Video Producer, Lesley Ovington.
When asked why this Thinkbox advert had become her favourite, Lesley said: “I love the entire series with Harvey because it’s so funny. I also had a Jack Russell Terrier growing up, and these adverts always reminded me of him. The entire series is great but the first one, Every Home Needs a Harvey, remains the best.”
101 Thinkbox
Thinkbox is unlike other companies analysed in this series, as it’s a marketing body for commercial television in the United Kingdom. Since 2005, Thinkbox has existed to manage the advertising for British TV channels and help businesses marketing on these networks meet their marketing objectives.
It’s shareholders are four major UK television networks: Channel 4, ITV, Sky Media and UKTV. As the trade body for these hugely popular networks, Thinkbox has needed to think outside the box when enticing businesses to advertise. All of these channels have hugely successful shows linked to them, and the advertising produced by Thinkbox had to match the creative energy of its shareholders.
Raining Cats and Thinkbox
Made with Red Brick Road, the advertising agency behind the iconic ‘Every Little Helps’ Tesco slogan, Thinkbox aired its Every Home Needs a Harvey advert in 2010 – five years after the trade body was created and was still relatively unknown to the general public. Every Home Needs a Harvey was only their second television advert ever; the first also made by Red Brick Road. According to the agency, the brief from Thinkbox was to educate media planners and marketing directors about the power of TV advertising.
“‘Harvey’ was born – a resourceful, talented dog, who uses TV to tell stories and to persuade. His first TV outing, created by us in 2010, was voted Ad of the Year by ITV1 viewers. TV ad revenues reached a record £5bn in 2014, continuing 5 years of successive growth.”
Television has seen a lot of competition in recent years as an advertising destination, especially as more viewers move away from television to advert-free streaming platforms. Comparatively cheaper adverts can also be run on social media, with algorithms used to ensure it ends up in front of the ideal demographic for your product. As Red Brick Road proves, however, revenue can still be generated from television adverts. Businesses invested £1.2 billion GBP in television advertising in 2021, a 42% increase in spending compared to 2020. With the cost-of-living crisis forcing consumers to unsubscribe from costly streaming services, this revenue may grow further as viewers return to public networks like Channel 4 and ITV.
Thinkbox & Me
ITV1 viewers named Every Home Needs a Harvey Ad of the Year in 2010, and Red Brick Road went on to produce two additional Harvey adverts for Thinkbox between 2010 and 2014. The advert was clearly popular when it aired, but that was thirteen years ago. What was it about this advert that stuck in the memories of so many people?
Super Sell
Show don’t tell. That’s what Thinkbox accomplished by running Every Home Needs a Harvey. What better way to demonstrate the power of advertising than to create an advert about advertising. In the advert, Harvey presents a video to his potential adopters which sells the idea of choosing him amongst the line up of rescue dogs. The other dogs look cute, but the video shows everything else Harvey can offer.
To marketers watching the advert, it also showed what television marketing still had to offer. Times have changed, and mass public adverts are no longer constrained to intermission breaks, newspapers and billboards. As we explored in Advert Alchemy: The Location, modern marketers have an overwhelming choice of advertising destinations from social media to video games to eggs (that’s not a typo, CBS put adverts on eggs in 2006, go read the blog if you haven’t already). But television adverts haven’t been chased off the stage, advertisers just need to be more creative to attract attention away from phone screens.
Heavenly Harvey
The star of the advert, Harvey, was played by Sykes, a dog actor who appeared in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Young Victoria and Doctor Who, as well as other notable films and television shows. In the year of his debut advert, he also acted in a John Smith’s Brewery advert alongside Peter Kay.
In the wake of the advert, Sykes’ Facebook page had 11,600 friends and he was getting offers to open pet shops around the country. Not bad for a rescue dog. He eventually retired in 2016 after going deaf, ending Thinkbox’s Harvey adverts in the process. Because who could follow such a good boy?
Monumental Music
Set to the 1974 song You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet by Canadian rock band Bachman-Turner Overdrive, the audience – like Harvey’s potential adopters – are quickly hooked into watching the advert. Like Cadbury’s Gorilla advert, the choice of such a popular song cannot be underestimated in the success of this advert.
The song peaked at number 2 in the UK singles charts the year of its release, beaten to the top by a Christmas song (Lonely This Christmas, Mud), which surprised the band who had been reluctant to release the song. You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet was introduced to a new generation in the mid-2000s thanks to one of Thinkbox’s shareholders: ITV. The network used the song for several years during its coverage of Formula One grand prix races, which reignited sales of this insanely catchy single thirty years after its release.
Content Worth Gold
What do you think? What made Thinkbox’s Every Home Needs a Harvey advert so successful? Watch the full advert below and let us know in the comments.
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8. Do you prefer reading paper or electronic books?
9. What is your favourite item of clothing?
10. Do you like your name? Would you ever change it?
13. Are you a restless sleeper?
14. Do you consider yourself a romantic?
15. Which element best represents you?
16. Who do you want to be closer to?
17. Do you miss someone at the moment?
18. Tell us about an early childhood memory.
47. How would you spend your ideal day?
48. Describe yourself using one word.
49. What do you regret the most?
50. Invent your own word. What does it mean?
8. Electronic books are easier to manage and I can carry them everywhere (obviously lol) but there’s just something about sitting down with a cup of tea flipping actual pages.
9. I love my hoodies, can never go wrong with a hoodie.
10. My name is very unique in its spelling so I like it although, I have many many many nicknames that I’m also fond of.
13. Uhhhh yes and no, depends on where I am really. Army made me a light sleeper regardless though.
14. Mr. Hopeless romantic at your service 🫡
15. Water maybe 🤔 very calm but can be a storm in a hot second. Flexible in all situations too, be like water my friend.
16. My siblings for sure, I have so many and I’m never really home these days.
17. I miss home in general, deployments take a toll. Anyone specific though? Maybe 🫢
18. Mmmmm I had a hamster named elephant and he had a ball he’d roll around in. We used to race around the house and drive my mother crazy lol
Guest post by Helena Corvin-Swahn, Territory Studio A motion graphics and vfx specialist, Territory’s team of artists and designers rely on an ever-evolving relationship with technology to realise their creative work. In 2016, AWS Thinkbox Deadline was implemented to efficiently manage the increase in rendering requirements as the studio scaled. With an opportunity to create […]
A great piece of work, looking at live data infographics for the ‘render farm’, where each dot represents the progress of a particular project being rendered. Imagine what SDRL could look like when translating their radio live data into a live visualization? If each shape represented an active user, listener or inactive user, where shapes come together with conversation. This would communicate a key message: TALKING BRINGS PEOPLE TOGETHER. It would tie into my research on why people are part of SDRL, one reason being loneliness which could be displayed through shapes far apart when inactive, and how SDLR brings people together like a family from all over the world, which could be suggested through shapes closer together.
The underlying message behind this would be how voice creates a stronger relationship between people in conversation, and that in a world of division, people can be pushed together.
But where would I bring in type?
Perhaps these shapes are letters, or the infographic data could form type somehow, responsive to live feed. More research needed into how I could tie infographics with typography.
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Anya is LIVE right now
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