Let go of the Foam

The trouble with being brilliant is that sustaining your brilliance gets harder and harder until, well, it just gets too hard. After “Citizen Kane” Orson Welles just gave up and concentrated on sherry commercials. After “Heart of Darkness” what did Francis Ford Coppola do? Well, go to www.ffcpresents.com and you’ll see. He’s taken up cooking.

What about Fallon? The London agency has had a phenomenal run of success, from Sony “Balls” through to “Paint” and “Rabbits” and on to Tate “Tracks”, Skoda “Cake” and the astonishing gorilla.

Now, however, they seem to be in danger of parodying their own ads. Their latest offering for Sony, this time for their cameras, is “Foam”. There is already a lot of blurb about it in cyberspace. When they made “Balls”, both client and agency were unprepared for the explosion of interest online in what they were doing. San Franciscans uploaded images and movies of bouncing balls and even edited their own Sony ads long before the official commercial was aired. Since then, client and agency have made sure their offline and their online communications dovetail in together.

So, we are already aware of the foaming ad, and tens of thousands will have seen it even though it isn’t ‘released’ here until the first week of May. But I’m disappointed in it, I’m afraid. It’s actually rather beautiful to watch – and is rather touching too, appealing to the child within. You can expect to see it at Cannes. But that word ‘it’ is the giveaway. It is one commercial, whereas what I expected from the hype was a more liberated kind of advertising.

I imagined that since Sony had handed out around 200 cameras of one sort or another to the citizens of Miami before releasing 4 millions gallons of fluff, they would all upload their movies and their stills and edit their own ads, hundreds of them. Rather than just one commercial, controlled by the agency creative team sitting in an edit suite in Soho, there would be many, put together by those who were there. And by those who weren’t.

Fallon have let balls, paint and rabbits loose on the street, creating magical events that drew in both real and virtual bystanders in their millions. But they still haven’t quite learned to let go completely. Yet.

/Patrick Collister/