The Gruen Transfer…
Tonight was the premier of a brand new show on ABC1 titled The Gruen Transfer, hosted by Wil Anderson who is making his return to the ABC since having his show The Glasshouse cancelled a few years ago.
The Gruen Transfer is a show all about how advertising works, a little ironic considering it is airing on the ABC and has been subject to complaints even before it went to air with people thinking that ad’s had been slipping through on the public broadcaster. It will look at different creative ways advertising is used, and have a lot of fun along the way.
The show each week will have four guest panellists who are experts in the field of advertising and are behind some of the well known commercials gracing our screens at the moment. For tonight’s premier episode the guests were Dee Madigan, Russel Howcroft, Todd Sampson and Dan Gregory.
The first segment of the show looked at a rather strange advertising scheme from food company Maggi who used houses in Venezuela’s capital Caracas to display its logo. The challenge for the panel members was to come up with other brands or ideas that could use this same idea.
Each week the show will have a main theme to discuss the tricks of the trade in regards to who the product is targeted at, how they target it at different types of people and so on, with this week’s product being beer ads. One of the tricks pointed out was that a beer ad will always have four blokes present, this is because beer is seen as a social drink. If one bloke is shown he would be seen as an alcoholic, two blokes and they are seen as homosexual, and for some reason never three just always four.
The best part of the show was a segment called The Pitch whereby two guests from an advertising agency would be given the challenge of making an ad to try and sell and impossible item that no-one would buy. This week that product was whale meat, and the results were quite funny with the theme both advertisers went for being one where people would have to make an ethical decision.
Finally there is an ad of the week where the panel will critically evaluate the merit of the ad and how clever its use has been in the selling of its product, this week they looked at Dove who produced ads on making woman feel beautiful.
The Gruen Transfer is a must watch, it is not a show about boring advertising techniques so do think you will be getting an education, although yes you will learn something, they are things worth knowing and in a funny way of finding them out. The Gruen Transfer can be seen on ABC1 9:00pm Wednesday night’s.
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