World’s best ads ever #35: Sony Bravia paints the town red... and yellow and blue
We asked our readers to vote for their favorite commercials of all time. Top creatives from the World Creative Rankings and The Drum’s Judges’ Club then ranked the ads. Now, we bring you the definitive 100 best TV and video ads of all time.
A rainbow-splattered romp on a housing estate in the south of Glasgow doesn’t sound like the most obvious way to sell televisions, but the best ads are rarely literal.
Sony had had great success advertising its Bravia model with the 2005 hit ‘Balls‘ (also on this list), which was soundtracked by Jose Gonzalez’s folksy song Heartbeats and conveyed the brightness and warmth captured on Sony TVs. Agency Fallon felt under pressure to go bigger and better for the follow up, however.
Enter ‘Paint‘, the Jonathan Glazer directed spot that saw Sony employ exploding paint bombs, which were detonated over the roof of a tower block, to quite literally paint the town red.
It’s a story that can perhaps best be told in numbers, having cost somewhere in the region of £2m to produce and taken 60 people five days to clean up after it (the tower block in question was due for demolition not long after the spot was filmed, otherwise it would have been more).
70,000 liters of environmentally friendly paint were used, along with 622 bottle bombs, 330 meters of steel pipe, 455 mortars, 57km of copper wire and 1,700 detonators to make the 60-second ad.