Wonder Woman and Haagen-Dazs, united in lazy marketing

'Don't hold back', you say? Well, OK, you asked for it...

You can't just paste a few snippets from a superhero movie into a pre-existing ice cream ad and then say you're "celebrating female empowerment and encouraging women with an inspiring call to arms".

And you shouldn't call the resulting work "a distinctly bold yet joyful experience for our consumers as we start 2021".  

But the above is exactly what Haagen-Dazs has done with a new global campaign tied into the newish film Wonder Woman 1984. (The film came out on Christmas day in some markets and is making its way around the world in a staggered release, which explains why a press release about the campaign came to Ad Nut today.)

If you find it hard to believe that the brand did nothing more than splice a few scenes from Wonder Woman 1984 into a pre-existing ad, then Ad Nut invites you to compare the original ad below, which came out in June, with the one above.

Apart from being monumentally lazy, the new "hero" film is a jumbled mess. The style changes as jarringly as you'd expect when it's cutting back and forth between two pieces of work that were created in completely different styles for completely different reasons. And obviously it makes no narrative sense; Ad Nut, in fact, became convinced that Wonder Woman was opening a can of righteous whup-ass on some sort of cult that loves ice cream and bright colours.

Ad Nut actually liked the original campaign, which was from Forsman & Bodenfors, and would be interested to see how the folks at F&B would react to seeing what UK-based agency Space* has done with their work.

There's all kinds of additional crap available as part of what is a large global campaign, including social media, influencer work, brand experiences, digital, radio and OOH. But the above paragraphs already represent far more attention than this thoughtless garbage deserves, and Ad Nut will be trying to avoid all of that stuff at all costs.

* Bonus rant: Space, according to its boilerplate, challenges "accepted category and communications thinking that can limit growth and efficiency" through the use of "unlearning techniques that uncover the difference in a brand, and original ways to express it". Ad Nut would like to learn about these unlearning techniques, so that Ad Nut could unlearn everything about this campaign. And then, Ad Nut would like to unlearn what Ad Nut has learned about the concept of unlearning.

Ad Nut is a surprisingly literate woodland creature that for unknown reasons has an unhealthy obsession with advertising. Ad Nut gathers ads from all over Asia and the world for your viewing pleasure, because Ad Nut loves you. You can also check out Ad Nut's Advertising Hall of Fame, or read about Ad Nut's strange obsession with 'murderous beasts'.