Go On Lad

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Go On Lad
A frame from "Go On Lad"
AgencyMiles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy
ClientPremier Foods
LanguageEnglish
Running time122 seconds (2 minutes and 2 seconds)
Product
Release date(s)12 September 2008
Directed byRingan Ledwidge
Music by"History" (Working for a Nuclear Free City)
Starring
  • Brian Mackie
Production
company		Rattling Stick
Produced bySally Humphries
CountryUnited Kingdom
Budget£1,000,000 (production)[1]
£15,000,000 (campaign)[2]
Followed byRolls
Official websitehttp://www.hovis.co.uk/

"Go On Lad" is a British

The Mill. It was directed by Ringan Ledwidge. "Go On Lad" premiered on British television
on 12 September 2008.

The advertisement, and its associated campaign, proved a popular, critical, and financial success. Its launch was covered by several national newspapers within the United Kingdom, including The Independent and the Daily Mirror, on television programmes including the Granada Reports and Loose Women, and by over 300 local and national radio stations. Sales of Hovis products jumped by over £12,000,000 in the weeks following the launch of Go On Lad, and over 1,000 unsolicited letters and e-mails were sent to Hovis praising the piece. The campaign received dozens of awards from the advertising and television industries, including Golds at the Creative Circle Awards, the Marketing Society Awards, and the British Television Advertising Awards. In 2009, the British public voted "Go On Lad" the best television commercial of the decade.

Sequence

"Go On Lad" begins in 1886, with an over-the-shoulders view of a boy in a flat cap and brown jacket buying a loaf of bread in a bakery. After making his purchase, the boy leaves the shop into a bustling Victorian-era street, narrowly avoiding being run down by a horse and cart. He is chased into an alleyway by the cart's driver, losing his flat cap in the pursuit, and he passes a poster about the Titanic. When he exits through the other side the alley, a suffragette protest is underway. The boy weaves through a crowd of marching women bearing placards, emerging into an open square during World War I, where he spies a column of young soldiers on parade. The boy accompanies the soldiers for a few moments before peeling away to climb a nearby wall. After saluting the soldier he had marched next to, he climbs down the other side into the interbellum, and runs past a couple engaged in a conversation beside a period car. He kicks a can through another alley, following it into another street; one in ruins from The Blitz.

The music turns sombre for a moment as a family of refugees passes by, and an excerpt from

council estate
in 2008 and sits down with the loaf of bread at his kitchen table. His mother calls to him, 'Is that you home, love?', to which the boy replies 'Yeah'. And the piece closes on a shot of the boy's hand reaching for a slice of the Hovis loaf over the tagline "As good today as it's always been."

Production

Background

From 1967 to 2007, the

market leader in the United Kingdom. However, following a "chop and change" marketing strategy, including several "confused" brand relaunches through the first half of the 2000s,[3] rival brand Warburtons had increased sales and profits, and in 2006 both brands had approximately 28% of the £1.6b UK bread market.[3][4] Despite continuing to show profits of £387m, Hovis continued to lose ground to Warburtons. Sales of the latter had increased by 24% in 2007 alone; by 2008, for every two loaves of Hovis sold in the UK, Warburtons sold three.[5] The continuing failure of the brand began to affect Premier Foods as a whole, with the company's share price dropping from £3.50 to £1.80 in the 18 months following the acquisition.[4]

Despite this, Hovis was still a valuable brand. Its reported profits, while declining, still amounted to £387m, making it the fourth largest grocery brand in the UK, behind

McCann Erickson, with the latter originally taking on Hovis.[8] But the CEO Helen Calcraft and Account Director Muna Nageh stayed close to the Hovis client and eventually had a chance to win the account out of McCann Erickson, who had failed to crack the brief whilst MCBD had been doing well on the brands they had won. The relaunch was the first campaign by MCBD for the brand, though it had done work on other Premier Foods labels such as Branston, Batchelors and OXO previously.[4]

Production

In April 2008, Goldstone met with the

greenlit the project immediately. A budget of £1,000,000 was put aside for production of the commercial alone, over three times as much as had ever been spent on production of a Premier Foods commercial to that date.[1]

With permission to go ahead, MCBD began searching for a

Orange earlier in 2008.[12] The Hovis campaign, now assigned the title Go On Lad, was the most expensive and complex commercial Ledwidge had directed to date.[10]

With only four months set aside for production of the commercial, work began in earnest on

Garston were recruited as extras for the Coronation scene, which was filmed at that location.[13]

In all, over 1750 people were hired to act as extras in Go On Lad,[19] including over 200 members of historical reenactment societies for the World War I scene alone.[13] In casting for the role of the boy, Ledwidge wanted to eschew the "stylised blonde healthy child seen in most modern European advertising" in favour of someone who would evoke memories of the actors in productions such as Kes or Great Expectations.[4] The boy eventually settled on for the role was Brian Mackie, a thirteen-year-old with no prior acting experience.[13][20]

Post-production

colliery, a Spitfire and a Concorde jet aeroplane (which was later cut in editing), crowd multiplication for the striking miners and suffragettes, and the recreation of the Millennial fireworks display.[21]

For editing of the commercial, Ledwidge looked to Richard Orrick, an editor he had collaborated with several times in the past. Several angles had been shot for each scene, as well as a number of cutaways establishing the era that the boy was travelling through. However, the brief for the commercial was specifically for a 122-second cut, one second for every year since the establishment of Hovis in 1886.[5] For this reason, and to reinforce the viewer's connection with the boy, almost every shot which didn't feature Mackie was cut. Additional editing work was done to smooth the transitions between eras and maintain a steady pace within the commercial's narrative.[11] Until half-way through editing, the music accompanying Go On Lad was to have been "Town Called Malice" by The Jam. However, after the right to use the piece had been purchased, alterations to the pacing of the narrative led Ledwidge to commission a new piece via Woodwork Music from Philip Kay of the Mancunian independent act Working for a Nuclear Free City, titled "History".[1][10]

Release and reception

Release

The campaign surrounding Go On Lad was conducted on a budget of £15m,[2] and comprised extensive public relations work by Frank PR,[22] the launch of a new Hovis website,[2] new packaging using a bolder typeface and stronger colours,[7] the re-launch of the unsliced "little brown loaf" featured in the campaign,[23] and changes to the formulae of other Hovis lines,[7] as well as a series of in-store deals and promotions.[19]

Public relations work in the lead-up to the release of Go On Lad included stunts such as the deliberate leaking of a false rumour that

making-of documentary featuring extra scenes, behind-the-scenes footage, and interviews with the cast and crew.[22] The impact of the PR work was such that the Hovis campaign received an estimated £2.5m of free publicity even before Go On Lad's first broadcast,[23] prompting competitors Kingsmill and Warburtons to vastly increase the number of in-store special offers and deals on their products as a defence tactic in the four weeks leading up to the ad's debut.[1]

The first broadcast of Go On Lad was at 8:45pm on Friday 12 September 2008, as the final advertisement of a commercial break in the popular soap opera Coronation Street.[10][24] ITV, the broadcaster of Coronation Street, were persuaded to cut the length of the programme by two seconds to accommodate the ad's unusual 122-second length.[7] The full version of the commercial continued to air in cinemas for four weeks,[19] with 90- and 10-second cuts appearing on television into early 2009.[18][24]

Reception

Reaction to the release of the campaign within the media industry was immediate. Features on the campaign and on Brian Mackie appeared in several national newspapers, including

video sharing website YouTube received over 180,000 hits and 1,000 comments.[23]

The public's response was equally impressive; within 24 hours of the first broadcast of Go On Lad, Hovis received over 1,000 unsolicited e-mails and letters praising the commercial.[2][26] Research by the qualitative assessment organisation Millward Brown showed that Hovis' brand image improved by 8% in terms of "product value", and 6% in terms of perception of quality and tastiness of the product. In addition, the communication of the brand's tagline, "As good today as it's always been", increased from its 52% norm to 86%, and research showed that consumers were far more likely to talk about the brand amongst themselves than prior to the campaign's launch.[23]

The response by the public translated directly into financial gains for the brand. Sales of Hovis products jumped by £12m in the three weeks following the campaign's launch.[23] By the end of the following month, Hovis' share of the UK bread market increased by 3.5%, with £60m added to the top line of the business.[27] By the end of November 2008, sales figures had increased by 14% from same period the previous year.[23] The success of the campaign was such that it lent a halo effect to Premier Foods as a whole. By January 2009, the company's profit margins had increased from 2.8% to 12.2% and its share price had more than doubled.[1]

The impact of the campaign did not go unnoticed by Hovis' competitors. Warburtons increased its annual marketing budget from £2m to £22m.

The X Factor.[29] Foreign Businessman was largely panned by the advertising community; it was declared one of the ten worst campaigns of 2008 by Campaign magazine.[30] Mark Ritson of Marketing magazine criticised Warburton's decisions on length and ad space purchases, saying: "Warburtons got similar audience numbers when it premiered its ad during The X Factor, but totally missed the context. It's a similar story with the length of the ads: Warburtons' 60-second spot is longer than the usual, but hardly breaks the mould.[5]

Ritson went on to praise the Go On Lad campaign, adding: "Choosing 122 seconds, one for every year in its history, was a stroke of genius by Hovis. It not only makes for an epic ad, but also emphasised the brand's heritage in the launch PR backing the campaign."

Cadbury's Gorilla.[36]

Legacy

As a result of the success of the campaign, several other companies followed suit with nostalgia-themed campaigns of their own, with mixed results.

WCRS commenting on the latter in Campaign magazine: "This is meagre fare, frankly, and allows the blogsters to concentrate on the elephant on the bacon counter: that the ad doesn't so much nod to the recent Hovis epic as pick a fight with it, shouting: 'I've got decades of British history, me! Hear my tinkling piano track! Look at my loveable urchin! Watch my wartime reconstruction!' The bloggers are less than whelmed by the similarities, and I feel the uncomfortable frisson of kinship with them."[38]

Several members of the crew behind Go On Lad went on to assist in Hovis' 2009 advertising campaign for its newly launched line of

bread rolls. Simply titled Rolls, the 60-second television commercial continued the theme of switching from the Victorian period to the present day, and was once again written by Gavin Torrance and Danny Hunt of MCBD.[39] While Ledwidge was originally interested in reprising his role as director,[40] production company Rattling Stick eventually assigned Ivan Bird to oversee the project. The Mill returned to perform post-production of the commercial.[39]

Several requests were made by teachers to Hovis for permission to use the commercial as a teaching tool in lessons on British history.[1] Headteacher Jennifer Bailey wrote: "After the advert first aired, it was a huge talking point among our pupils. With TV being such a popular medium nowadays, it's a fun way of highlighting key historical British moments."[41] The positive response to Go On Lad within the teaching community led Hovis to establish the "Hovis Educational Programme" in 2009, providing educational resources to a number of schools in a pilot scheme aimed at getting children more interested in history.[41]

Accolades

Creator Country Accolade Year Rank
ITV
 United Kingdom ITV Ad of the Decade[42] 2009 1

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i Goldstone, Jon; Brooke-Taylor, Danny; "Hovis - As good as it's always been" (part 2), Thinkbox (2008). Retrieved 17 May 2010.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h "How Hovis returned to TV triumphant", Brand Republic, 9 February 2009. Retrieved 17 May 2010.
  3. ^ a b "Analysis: Hovis revives its wholesome heritage in £15m relaunch.", Marketing Week, 7 August 2008. Retrieved 17 May 2010 via Accessmylibrary.com.
  4. ^ a b c d e f Goldstone, Jon; Brooke-Taylor, Danny; "Hovis - As good as it's always been" (part 1), Thinkbox (2008). Retrieved 17 May 2010.
  5. ^ a b c d e Ritson, Mark; "Mark Ritson on Branding: Serious dough to be made.", Marketing, 8 October 2008. Retrieved 17 May 2010 via Accessmylibrary.com.
  6. ^ Charles, Gemma; "Profile: Going against the grain.", Marketing, 1 April 2009. Retrieved 17 May 2010 via Accessmylibrary.com.
  7. ^ a b c d "Golden Jubilee Awards 2009: Brand revitalisation.", Marketing, 10 June 2009. Retrieved 17 May 2010 via Accessmylibrary.com.
  8. ^ Charles, Gemma; "Premier Foods to consolidate design roster", Marketing, 8 January 2008. Retrieved 17 May 2010.
  9. ^ Byrne, Ciar; "Ridley Scott's Hovis advert is voted all-time favourite", The Independent, 2 May 2006. Retrieved 17 May 2010.
  10. ^ a b c d e "A Day in the Loaf", The Independent, 8 September 2008. Retrieved 18 May 2010.
  11. ^ a b "Prime cuts Archived 2012-03-13 at the Wayback Machine", Boards, 1 November 2008. Retrieved 18 May 2010.
  12. ^ Ritchie, Kevin; "It's a passion Archived 2012-03-13 at the Wayback Machine", Boards, 1 May 2009. Retrieved 18 May 2010.
  13. ^ a b c d e The Making Of Go On Lad (2008), MCBD.
  14. ^ a b "it's Hovis street.", The Daily Star, 19 October 2008. Retrieved 18 May 2010 via Accessmylibrary.com.
  15. ^ Jones, Catherine (29 July 2008). "City's 'owt in front as Hovis ad hits streets". Liverpool Echo. Retrieved 15 July 2020.
  16. ^ "Go on Lad – Hovis Commercial". Liverpool Film Office. 3 September 2008. Retrieved 15 July 2020.
  17. ^ Miles, Tina (12 September 2008). "Look what Hovis did to our street". Liverpool Echo. Retrieved 15 July 2020.
  18. ^ a b c d Meacock, Lucy; Morris, Tony; "Making the Hovis Ad: Interview with Kevin Bell", Granada Reports, 13 September 2008.
  19. ^ a b c "Editor's Pick: Hovis ‘Go On Lad’", Utalkmarketing.com (2008). Retrieved 18 May 2010.
  20. The Daily Mirror
    , 13 September 2008. Retrieved 18 May 2010.
  21. The Mill
    , 18 September 2008.
  22. ^ a b c d e "Integrated marketing: Make my ad famous.", PR Week, 14 November 2008. Retrieved 18 May 2010 via Accessmylibrary.com.
  23. ^ a b c d e f g "Annual: Campaign of the Year - Hovis.", Campaign, 12 December 2008. Retrieved 18 May 2010.
  24. ^ a b "Hovis: Britishness", Utalkmarketing.com, 13 September 2008. Retrieved 18 May 2010.
  25. The Daily Mirror
    , 12 September 2008.
  26. ^ "The Thinkboxes Winner - September 2008: Hovis - Go On Lad Archived 2010-08-19 at the Wayback Machine", Thinkbox, September 2008. Retrieved 18 May 2010.
  27. ^ "Return of the Great British Brand", Marketing, 24 June 2009. Retrieved 19 May 2010 via Accessmylibrary.com.
  28. ^ "Warburtons to take on Hovis with pounds 22m push.", Marketing", 1 October 2008. Retrieved 19 May 2010.
  29. ^ Leroux, Marcus; "Warburtons launches battle of the bakers with £22m campaign", The Times, 6 October 2008. Retrieved 19 May 2010.
  30. ^ "Campaign's top ten turkeys of 2008", Campaign, 11 December 2008. Retrieved 19 May 2010.
  31. ^ "Campaign's top 10 TV and cinema ads", Campaign, 12 December 2008. Retrieved 19 May 2010.
  32. ^ "Nothing came close to Hovis", Campaign, 14 November 2008. Retrieved 19 May 2010 via Accessmylibrary.com.
  33. ^ "The Week: Sainsbury's wins Marketing Society Grand Prix award.", Campaign, 12 June 2009. Retrieved 19 May 2010 via Accessmylibrary.com.
  34. ^ "Industry news and people moves Archived 2012-03-13 at the Wayback Machine", Boards, 17 May 2009. Retrieved 19 May 2010.
  35. ^ Gunn, Thomas; "The Gunn Report and Showreel of the Year" (2009), Flaxman Wilkie.
  36. ^ Thomas, Joe; "Hovis tops ITV's Ad Of The Decade with 'Go On Lad'", Marketing, 21 December 2009. Retrieved 23 April 2010.
  37. ^ Huntingdon, Richard; "Brands turn to nostalgia in difficult times", New Media Age, 11 June 2009. Retrieved 19 May 2010.
  38. ^ "The Work: Private View.", Campaign, 29 May 2009. Retrieved 19 May 2010.
  39. ^
    The Mill
    , 23 June 2009.
  40. ^ White, Ed; "Ringan Ledwidge Joins Smuggler US Archived 2012-03-13 at the Wayback Machine", Boards, 16 June 2009. Retrieved 19 May 2010.
  41. ^
    Bristol Evening Post
    , 6 July 2009. Retrieved 19 May 2010.
  42. ^ "TellyAds - ITV Ad of the Decade".

External links

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