Puritans at Kraft May End Five Decades of Risque Cadbury Flake Ads
Kraft (KFT) just completed its takeover of Cadbury and one of its first decisions was to kill a new ad for the chocolate bar Flake, which it deemed too racy, Campaign and the Daily Mail report. Kraft also fired Saatchi & Saatchi from the account. If the puritans at Kraft have decided to tone down the Flake business, it will bring to an end one of the few truly enduring campaigns in modern ad history.
It will also indicate that they don't get the joke.
The backstory here is that since the 1960s, Flake ads in the United Kingdom have been infamous for their eroticism (or puerility, depending on your point of view). Each one features a beautiful woman enjoying some orally focused alone-time with a crumbly, phallic Flake, in increasingly elaborate settings. Even the music and lyrics for the ads -- "Only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate / tastes like chocolate never tasted before" -- have been the same for five decades.
The ads have become a jokey institution -- the question is always, What excuse will Flake think up next for this hokey but memorable device? Flake ads reached their zenith (or nadir) in 2001 when the company published billboards showing a bare-shouldered woman sucking on the chocolate with the tagline, "How much would you like this woman's job?" The Daily Mail reported:
Cadbury insisted at the time that the advert simply invited people to consider how much they would like to be paid to eat a Flake.Cadbury's po-faced response tells you a lot about the way this campaign works: The payoff is Cadbury's comedically unreasonable insistence that any sexual content in the advertising is purely inside your own filthy mind.
And, for anyone in Britain who went to a movie in the 1980s and heard the audience gasp and guffaw through the commercial in which a woman in a silk slip sits on a window ledge eating a Flake while -- for no reason at all -- a lizard crawls across the dial of her unanswered telephone, Kraft is killing a piece of your childhood.
Whether Kraft, an American company, truly "gets" this is, as yet, a mystery. In the meantime, lest we forget, here's a gallery of historic Flake ads, in reverse chronological order.
2007: In "Summer Rain," model Alyssa Sutherland eats a Flake during a reverse-rainstorm. 1991: A woman likes her Flake so much she forgets to turn the bath taps off. Late 1980s: The classic "lizard telephone" ad, regarded at the time as the sexiest -- and silliest -- spot ever broadcast in the U.K. Early 1990s: In "Waterfall" the Flake girl gets a dunking for the first time. 1985: The Flake girl is accidentally whisked away by a driver-less gypsy caravan. Obviously! Late 1970s: In this one, the Flake girl paints a watercolor in a meadow which then gets rained on. The "wet" theme would re-emerge in the 1990s. 1960s: Everything you need to know about Flake advertising can be seen in this ad, including the company's obsession with waterfalls, wetness, the countryside and oral sex.