Monkey Business

It had been a funny old day. Firstly, Google Adsense had served an ad to my blog for a company that I hold beneath contempt (for reasons that shall I shall keep to myself) – but how were they to know that? Secondly, Amazon sent me an email in which their much vaunted predictive algorithms had calculated “Phil Collins – Hits” as a recommendation for me.

How wrong could they be?!

Imagine if I actualy clicked on the link and bought the album. With all the fuss going on at the moment about how much Google and Amazon know about us, consider being tarred with the Phil Collins tag. My future online life would be destroyed. It would be the cyberspatial equivalent of herpes. It would be like being sent to prison for one of those crimes for which the other lags tend to try and dispense justice to you with a fruit knife.

And then, Old Father Irony delivers a twist in the tail. I look up and there on the TV is a gorilla sitting at a set of drums listening to the intro to what was, admitedly, Phil Collins’s opus. The apotheosis of his solo career. The Eighties zenith from which he could only look down – In The Air Tonight. Of course when the drum solo kicks in, so does the gorilla. Bashing away he drifts off into a post-coital cigarette, gorilla-tom-tom zone out. And what is the advert for? Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. Brilliant. “A Glass and a Half Full Production” by creative agency Fallon, where the product and the creative execution are completely incongrous. Yet having seen it once you will never forget what the ad was for.

Interestingly, as of now, they haven’t posted it on YouTube and they’ve anti-ripped it on the accompanying microsite with a fairly lame attempt at datacapture. This seems odd as this ad should go globally viral and no one will mind that it is an ad. I’m sure it will be up there in a minute or two. Click on the gorilla and sit back for a glass and a half of joy.