Andrew Boulton's World Cup ad reviews: Best one yet? Chilean miners star in brilliant Banco de Chile ad
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It’s the World Cup, buy our fancy boots. Yes the colour may remind you of when you went on that absinth bender and was sick on a swan. Yes they may cost more than having working goat legs sewn onto your body. And yes you’re probably already really busy buying tenuously World Cup-themed crisps, chocolates and other foodstuffs that are not likely to render you fit enough to mow the lawn let own kick a ball. But, nonetheless… Buy. Our. Shit.
Said every World Cup advert ever, right? Shallow, impersonal, cynical and single-mindedly determined to shake you by the ankles until the money you were saving for your children’s clothes and food clatters to the ground.
Well friends, set your faces to ‘Crikey!’ and track down the World Cup advert from Banco De Chile, the leading Chilean bank and official sponsor of the Chilean national team. I say advert, but it’s notable for not actually explicitly trying to sell you anything.
Instead what you’ll see is an exhilarating, genuinely thrilling piece of creative advertising that will leave you feeling like you’ve been punched in both lungs (in a beautiful way). Maybe banks aren’t all worse than having to wear Nigel Farage’s unwashed pants after all.
The premise for the ad is a rousing speech by Mario Sepúlveda, spokesperson for the Chilean miners who were trapped in 2010 while the world watched on. The drip-fed footage of their release was some of the most compelling and uplifting news footage of recent years.
And for this advert that sense of tigerish determination and the sheer will to survive is harnessed perfectly. The execution itself is remarkable, as the idea to market the story of these real-life survivors could easily have come across as crudely exploitative or, worse still, mawkish. The pitch of this treatment is flawless and the script (and delivery) is amongst the most truly inspiring language ever used in sports advertising.
What’s more, it’s this kind of glorious and stirring language that all sports advertisers are chasing, no more so than around World Cup time. Most miss their mark, failing to make the leap from speaking as a brand to speaking as a conduit for the moment. Admittedly some get it right. This does it immaculately.
The Chilean football team finds itself in what, with football’s love for the hyperbolic, we refer to as the ‘Group of Death’. Playing Holland and world champions Spain may be tricky, but ask a chap who has spent 70 days trapped 700 metres beneath the surface of the earth to describe death and I doubt he’ll point his finger at Robin Van Persie.
"We don’t care about death!" cries Sepúlveda, "because we have beaten death before!" His fellow miners erupt in cheers and I, shameful, emotional weakling that I am, smash like a gorilla’s teacup.
The message seems to be that yes, football’s not that important, but life is. And these miners, now urging their footballers to play with the spirit and belief that brought them back from the darkness, is the perfect embodiment of why we all get so utterly ridiculous about a game. The World Cup (for all its many flaws, injustice and hypocrisies) can be one of the good bits of life, and these men who have seen some of the worst bits want us all to know it.
Andrew will be back with another World Cup ad review tomorrow. Until then, read his less than flattering reviews of the World Cup efforts from Mars and Nike and follow him on Twitter @Boultini