The Latest Fad: Living Life to the Fullest

Visa debuted its “Life Takes Visa” ad campaign a couple of months back during the olympics, highlighting a major trend in advertising of late: living life. Or perhaps it’s living life again - a getting back to the earthy basics - friends and family, wholesomeness, judicious amounts of play and self-indulgence in between the grindstones.

When I read about the campaign in the newspaper right before it actually debuted, it fell flat. But then seeing the ads changed my mind and I’ve come to quite like it. My favorite is probably the one entitled “Life Takes Risk” with a guy sniffing a carton of milk with a hopefully raised eyebrow and skeptically wrinkled nostril.

Visa is not alone in this, I’ve spotted quite a few companies taking the Life angle. Grocery chain Safeway started a campaign a few months back positioning them as supplying “Ingredients For Life,” full of pictures of fresh sweetcorn and strawberries and people running through meadows.

On a slightly different tack, Kaiser Permanente has been pushing a “Thrive” message, similarly accompanied by billboards with gigantic blueberries.

My most recent sighting came while pumping gas the other day at a 76 station where I noticed an ad on top of the pump stating that “Life Happens Between Empty and Full”. Something about this one really rubs me the wrong way, perhaps the implication that life only exists inside the car, when really mostly time in the car is spent getting ready for the actual life living. (They are also using Rotis, what has become a highly over-exposed font, which is unfortunate as it’s really a terrific font…)

One could argue that Citibank kicked the whole thing off a few years back with their “Live Richly” campaign which has consistently put out “make you think for a moment” bon mots. It was a harbinger of things to come, as cynically as it might have seemed at the time, but obviously has struck a chord that I think goes beyond echo-chamber me-too advertising. There’s something broader going on here.

Is this another stage of reaction to 9/11, a pop culture expression of a broad social gestalt? We’ve gone through anger, grief, recovery, and now onto, perhaps, living life once more.

Comments

[Steve Portigal]

Indeed the safeway ads and the Kaiser thrive ads share similar imagery
http://www.adpulp.com/archives/safeway_life.jpg
I can't find the Kaiser one that looked identical, unfortunately.

[Mark Stanton]

When I saw the "76" ad in your blog I just had to say something. No doubt someone at 76 made the decision to spend zillions of dollars on updating their brand image... and made what I call the most disastrous brand decision of this century (albeit a young century). That decision was to change the orange to red... nothing else, just orange to red. They've been updating their stations across the country and having the orange signage destoyed, ALMOST always before sentimental gearheads are able to bribe the guy driving the truck to let one disappear. Sad.

Mark
ID guy, gearhead

[Adam]

Mark-

You're absolutely right...I didn't comment on the shift to red, but I've been disappointed with that too. It's taking them to such a basic, primary-based color scheme, when a tweak to the orange would have given them much more currency. Orange has been coming back as an "in" color, that they could have done more with that, keeping themselves up to date without losing the legacy.

Adam

[Matthew Brown]

Agree with the above comment about the 76 color scheme change. Also, it's moving from a distinctive color choice (orange and blue) to one that everyone else uses (red and blue). Red-white-blue is such an overdone 'patriotic' color scheme in the US that I'd advise companies to avoid it. In the gas-station market, it's the colors used by Arco, Mobil, Chevron and Exxon at least, if not more.