What’s with making biscuits into characters these days? My basic criteria for whether a biscuit interests me or not is whether it’s crammed full of sugar, butter, jam, caramel, cream, toffee and other such filth, not whether it’s called Jonathan.
Still, with chocolate dodgers and toffee dodgers joining the classic jammie dodgers I suppose it was only a matter of time before we had three biscuits called Choccie, Toffee and Jammie vying for our attention (how about a healthy one called Salad?).
But who could have foreseen that they’d have monkey heads? Grotesque, jerking marionettes with a monkey head in the middle of a jammy dodger aren’t something I’d immediately decide I wanted to put in my mouth, if I’m honest, but there’s a bit of a trend of late to just throw a lot of dumb, knowing references into adverts and see what comes out the other side.
It’s as tedious as it’s bizarre, a group-think corporate notion of surreal. But they’re actually quite disturbing too, like the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz have pitched up in a tea-time treat to freak the shit out of your young ones.
I’d like to think that Jammie Money Dodger rips the woman’s face off in the ad, as monkeys are inclined to do if they’re the sort of rascally monkeys that hang around cities on the Med. As if the supermarket adverts weren’t enough, here’s a hilarious extended spot showing the monkeys dancing in some tiresome Youtube thing that LOLing kids will listlessly watch for 23 seconds on Facebook.
Ehhhhhh, anyways here’s Ed Maxwell – the account director at VCCP, who have the brief and also do a number of other ‘talking animal/thing’ ads, including the Meerkat ones:
“With this campaign we wanted to convey the mischief at the heart of every biscuit and unlock the love which families have for this classic British brand.”
Hmm, it’s better than ‘challenging and daring’ I suppose, but personally I now find it impossible to imagine eating a jammie dodge without a horrible little monkey’s head in the middle of it, grimacing as if it’s in the process of knocking one out – like all monkeys seem to on a regular basis – and chirping away at me in that awful whiney estuary accent that all ad voiceovers deploy these days to show that they’re on the same wavelength as the rest of us scum.
So now, instead of thinking of jam and sugar and butter I think of one of those vicious monkeys that grab your ice-cream in Morocco, shouting about toffee and tossing its shiny little red knob off.
Anyone fancy a biscuit?
NB. Have a look at the monkey dace off one. At 45 seconds the chocolate monkey jammie dodger thing is, quite clearly, rubbing one out. Dirty monkey.
And here’s some other stuff this brings to mind.