This week’s Ad of the Week hasn’t won on creative merit and should perhaps be awarded ‘Troll of the Week’. But whatever your views on who owns the Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas, you’d have to agree that WPP’s Y&R agency (Buenos Aires) have created an ad that reached its intended audience and evoked the desired emotion/action. The ad features Fernando Zylberberg, an Argentinian hockey player, who uses the Falkland Islands to train for the London 2012 Olympics.
We see the hockey player training around the island, using things like war memorials to fallen soldiers for a bit of anti-British step aerobics. Yeah, take that dead soldiers. As the ad finishes, we’re told that, ‘To compete on English soil, We train on Argentinian soil’. Maradona, sadly, does not feature.
Right on cue, the British press (including VAN) and the UK Government have been more than happy to oblige the Argentinians with a response that’s worth millions to the Argentinians in PR. Meanwhile, The Telegraph reports that Martin Sorrell, who they say assisted Margaret Thatcher in getting to power via Saatchi & Saatchi, is furious, describing the ad as “totally unacceptable” and saying that he was “appalled and embarrassed by it”.
