World’s best ads ever #76: Barclaycard’s ‘Waterslide’ convinces us all to go contactless
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.
Remember when contactless payment technology first became available and we were all a little scared of it? Oh, we can laugh now, but convincing people of the benefits of seamless transactions was a real headache for banks for a while there. Thankfully they did convince us, because otherwise we’d have spent the entire pandemic disinfecting Pin pads whenever we wanted to buy something.
Barclaycard can, in part, be thanked for this. Back in 2008 it was set on persuading us all to go contactless and called on BBH to come up with a concept that would highlight its convenience. That concept involved an enormous waterslide.
Developed by BBH creative director Pete Bradly and creatives Gary McCreadie and Wesley Hawes, with agency producer Nerine Soper, the spot was shot in São Paulo by director Peter Thwaites and starred Robert Wilfort, who went on to play Jason West in Gavin and Stacey.
Set to the Bellamy Brothers’ 1976 hit Let Your Love Flow, we see Wiltfort as a bespectacled office worker who finishes his shift by stripping down to his underwear and jumping feet-first into a waterslide that conveys him across the city, via rooftops, shops and libraries, all the way home.
This fantasy waterslide becomes a metaphor for having a Barclaycard, enabling you to glide through life and succeed easily. And, with humour and the occasional emotional moment, it acts as a creative device that gets across the idea that this scary new technology is actually fun and pretty practical.
The video quickly became an internet sensation, racking up millions of views on YouTube.