Go On Lad
Encyclopedia
Go On Lad is a British television and cinema
advertisement
launched by Premier Foods
in 2008 to promote its Hovis
brand of bread. The 122-second piece was commissioned as part of a £15,000,000 brand relaunch designed to reverse Hovis' declining market share
and profits. The commercial follows the journey of a young boy through 122 years of British history, from the establishment of the Hovis brand in 1886 to the current day. The campaign was handled by advertising agency
Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy. Production of the commercial itself was contracted to London-based production company
Rattling Stick, with post-production
handled by The Mill
. It was directed by Ringan Ledwidge. Go On Lad premiered on British television on 12 September 2008.
The advertisement, and its associated campaign, proved a popular, critical, and financial success. Its launch was covered by several national newspapers within the United Kingdom, including The Independent
, The Daily Mail, and The Daily Mirror
, on television programming such as the Granada Reports
and Loose Women
, and by over 300 local and national radio stations. Sales of Hovis products jumped by over £12,000,000 in the weeks following the launch of Go On Lad, and over 1,000 unsolicited letters and e-mails were sent to Hovis praising the piece. The campaign received dozens of awards from the advertising and television industries, including Golds at the Creative Circle Awards, the Marketing Society Awards, and the British Television Advertising Awards. In 2009, the British public voted Go On Lad the best television commercial of the decade.
street, narrowly avoiding being run down by a horse and cart. He is chased into an alleyway by the cart's driver, losing his flat cap in the pursuit, and he passes a poster about the Titanic. When he exits through the other side the alley, the world has moved on to the first decade of the 1900s, and a suffragette
protest is underway. The boy weaves through a crowd of marching women bearing placards, emerging into an open square during World War I
, where he spies a column of young soldiers on parade. The boy accompanies the soldiers for a few moments before peeling away to climb a nearby wall. After saluting the soldier he had marched next to, he climbs down the other side into the interbellum
, and runs past a couple engaged in a conversation beside a period car. He kicks a can through another alley, following it into another street; one in ruins from The Blitz
.
The music turns sombre for a moment as a family of refugees passes by, and an excerpt from Winston Churchill
's delivery of the "We shall fight on the beaches
" speech plays from a radio in a nearby home. A Spitfire
flies overhead as the boy climbs over a pile of rubble to enter a new street, in which residents were engaged in a street party
celebrating the accession of Elizabeth II
. He crawls under the table, takes a biscuit and a glass of lemonade, then runs on into 1966, where a group celebrating England's victory in the 1966 FIFA World Cup
chant "Champions!" as they pass him in a car. From here, changes to the boys costume are made with every transition, reflecting the fashions of the periods he passes through. Farther down the road from 1966, the boy passes a British Asian
couple in the 1970s, reflecting the spike in immigration in the community during that period. He turns a corner, running into a conflict between police and striking miners
in the 1980s. One of the miners jeers the boy, and he continues running. As he runs alongside a river during the Millennium celebrations on New Year's Day
2000, fireworks go off in the background. Finally, the boy makes a turn into a council estate in 2008 and sits down with the loaf of bread at his kitchen table. His mother calls to him, 'Is that you home, love?', to which the boy replies 'Yeah'. And the piece closes on a shot of the boy's hand reaching for a slice of the Hovis loaf over the tagline "As good today as it's always been."
brand of bread
was owned by Rank Hovis McDougall, and for much of that time was the market leader in the United Kingdom. However, following a "chop and change" marketing strategy, including several "confused" brand relaunches through the first half of the 2000s, rival brand Warburtons
had increased sales and profits, and in 2006 both brands had approximately 28% of the £1.6b UK bread market. The situation continued to worsen after Premier Foods
purchased Rank Hovis McDougall in 2007, taking on debt to do so. Despite continuing to show profits of £387m, Hovis continued to lose ground to Warburtons. Sales of the latter had increased by 24% in 2007 alone; by 2008, for every two loaves of Hovis sold in the UK, Warburtons sold three. The continuing failure of the brand began to affect Premier Foods as a whole, with the company's share price
dropping from £3.50 to £1.80 in the 18 months following the acquisition.
Despite this, Hovis was still a valuable brand. Its reported profits, while declining, still amounted to £387m, making it the fourth largest grocery brand in the UK, behind Coca-Cola
, Warburtons, and Walkers Crisps. Premier Foods hired a new head of marketing, Jon Goldstone, known for a strong branding background at Procter & Gamble
. Goldstone quickly identified the issue facing Hovis, surmising that "[Hovis] had got into a situation where Warburtons was synonymous with healthier bread from real bakeries and Kingsmill had cornered the value end of the market. We were being squeezed and were falling fast." Goldstone's solution was to re-launch the brand, changing the formula of the bread, redesigning the packaging, and putting £15m into a new advertising campaign. To this end, Premier Foods consolidated its marketing across all brands into two advertising agencies
, Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy (MCBD) and McCann Erickson
, with the former taking on Hovis. The relaunch was the first campaign by MCBD for the brand, though it had done work on other Premier Foods labels in the past.
of MCBD, Danny Brooke-Taylor, to discuss the advertising campaign which was to accompany the relaunch. The two reviewed previous Hovis advertising for ideas, paying particular attention to the 1973 television advertisement Boy On Bike. Directed by Ridley Scott
, Boy On Bike was an iconic piece of British culture; in a 2003 poll, over 60% of British people over 40 years old could still hum the theme used in the commercial ("New World Symphony by Dvorak
), and in 2006 it was voted the greatest advertising campaign of all time by the public. From this, the campaign's theme was established: nostalgia. A pitch was put together by creative team
Gavin Horrance and Danny Hunt of MCBD, comprising a set of "mood films" constructed from stock footage, and the idea of "the perilous journey a young boy takes through 122 years of British history to bring the small brown load back to his mam." The pitch was presented to Qualitative Assessment, a focus group
of consumers, where it met a very positive response. From there, Goldman took the proposal directly to Robert Schofield, the head of Premier Foods, who greenlit the project immediately. A budget of £1,000,000 was put aside for production of the commercial alone, over three times as much as had ever been spent on production of a Premier Foods commercial to that date.
With permission to go ahead, MCBD began searching for a director
to lead the production, eventually settling on Ringan Ledwidge. Ledwidge, who was working with Daniel Kleinman
at the London-based production company
Rattling Stick, had a reputation for good work on "magical realism" projects, with previous work including Forever for Volkswagen
in 2002, and Rewind City for Orange earlier in 2008. The Hovis campaign, now assigned the title Go On Lad, was the most expensive and complex commercial Ledwidge had directed to date.
With only four months set aside for production of the commercial, work began in earnest on scouting for locations
and cast capable of presenting the desired tone for Go On Lad. Several locations across the United Kingdom were looked at as potential sites for the six-day shoot, but while the producers of Boy On Bike had dressed a street in Dorset
to appear Northern
, Ledwidge opted to film in Northern England itself. Liverpool
's Sweeting Street was dressed for use as the setting for the opening Victorian scene, while Falkner Street appeared as the interbellum scene. Workers for the City Council
partially demolished three buildings to set the scene for the Blitz section, bringing in over fifty tonnes of rubble for the set dressing. Locals of Hardy Street in Garston
were recruited as extras for the Coronation scene, which was filmed at that location.
In all, over 750 people were hired to act as extras in Go On Lad, including over 200 members of historical reenactment
societies for the World War I scene alone. In casting for the role of the boy, Ledwidge wanted to eschew the "stylised blonde healthy child seen in most modern European advertising" in favour of someone who would evoke memories of the actors in productions such as Kes
or Great Expectations
. The boy eventually settled on for the role was Brian Mackie, a thirteen-year-old with no prior acting experience.
was contracted to The Mill
, who were given the brief to make it appear as though no computer-generated imagery
or other visual effects
had been used at all. The majority of the visual effects work was done using the Autodesk
software Flame
and Maya. This included simple work such as removing anachronistic
yellow road markings, satellite dishes, and replacing PVC windows. More complex work included the removal of several buildings with modern architectural styles or features, the creation of a CGI colliery, a Spitfire
and a Concorde
jet aeroplane (which was later cut in editing), crowd multiplication for the striking miners and suffragettes, and the recreation of the Millennial fireworks display.
For editing
of the commercial, Ledwidge looked to Richard Orrick, an editor he had collaborated with several times in the past. Several angles had been shot for each scene, as well as a number of cutaway
s establishing the era that the boy was travelling through. However, the brief for the commercial was specifically for a 122-second cut, one second for every year since the establishment of Hovis in 1886. For this reason, and to reinforce the viewer's connection with the boy, almost every shot which didn't feature Mackie was cut. Additional editing work was done to smooth the transitions between eras and maintain a steady pace within the commercial's narrative. Until half-way through editing, the music accompanying Go On Lad was to have been "Town Called Malice
" by The Jam
. However, after the right to use the piece had been purchased, alterations to the pacing of the narrative led Ledwidge to commission a new piece from the Mancunian independent act Working for a Nuclear Free City
, titled "History".
.
Public relations work in the lead-up to the release of Go On Lad included stunts such as the deliberate leaking of a false rumour that footballer Wayne Rooney
would be appearing in the ad as the new face of Hovis, the inclusion of several tabloid journalists as extras in the production, and the release of a making-of documentary featuring extra scenes, behind-the-scenes footage, and interviews with the cast and crew. The impact of the PR work was such that the Hovis campaign received an estimated £2.5m of free publicity even before Go On Lads first broadcast, prompting competitors Kingsmill and Warburtons to vastly increase the number of in-store special offers and deals on their products as a defence tactic in the four weeks leading up to the ad's debut.
The first broadcast of Go On Lad was at 8:45pm on Friday 12 September 2008, as the final advertisement of a commercial break in the popular soap opera
Coronation Street
. ITV
, the broadcaster of Coronation Street, were persuaded to cut the length of the programme by two seconds to accommodate the ad's unusual 122-second length. The full version of the commercial continued to air in cinemas for four weeks, with 90- and 10-second cuts appearing on television into early 2009.
Television advertisement
A television advertisement or television commercial, often just commercial, advert, ad, or ad-film – is a span of television programming produced and paid for by an organization that conveys a message, typically one intended to market a product...
advertisement
Advertising
Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...
launched by Premier Foods
Premier Foods
Premier Foods plc is a British food manufacturer headquartered in St Albans, Hertfordshire. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.-History:...
in 2008 to promote its Hovis
Hovis
Hovis is a UK brand of flour and bread, owned by Premier Foods. The brand, which began in 1886, ended up as part of Rank Hovis McDougall in 1962 after a succession of mergers. RHM, whose bread making division has been known as British Bakeries since 1955, also owns the Mother's Pride and Nimble...
brand of bread. The 122-second piece was commissioned as part of a £15,000,000 brand relaunch designed to reverse Hovis' declining market share
Market share
Market share is the percentage of a market accounted for by a specific entity. In a survey of nearly 200 senior marketing managers, 67 percent responded that they found the "dollar market share" metric very useful, while 61% found "unit market share" very useful.Marketers need to be able to...
and profits. The commercial follows the journey of a young boy through 122 years of British history, from the establishment of the Hovis brand in 1886 to the current day. The campaign was handled by advertising agency
Advertising agency
An advertising agency or ad agency is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising for its clients. An ad agency is independent from the client and provides an outside point of view to the effort of selling the client's products or services...
Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy. Production of the commercial itself was contracted to London-based production company
Production company
A production company provides the physical basis for works in the realms of the performing arts, new media art, film, television, radio, and video.- Tasks and functions :...
Rattling Stick, with post-production
Post-production
Post-production is part of filmmaking and the video production process. It occurs in the making of motion pictures, television programs, radio programs, advertising, audio recordings, photography, and digital art...
handled by The Mill
The Mill (post-production)
The Mill is a post-production and visual effects company launched in 1990 with offices in London, New York and Los Angeles.The Mill's Film special effects subsidiary, Mill Film, won an Oscar for its work on the film Gladiator. The Mill was the first UK-based post-production company to set up...
. It was directed by Ringan Ledwidge. Go On Lad premiered on British television on 12 September 2008.
The advertisement, and its associated campaign, proved a popular, critical, and financial success. Its launch was covered by several national newspapers within the United Kingdom, including The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
, The Daily Mail, and The Daily Mirror
The Daily Mirror
The Daily Mirror is a British national daily tabloid newspaper which was founded in 1903. Twice in its history, from 1985 to 1987, and from 1997 to 2002, the title on its masthead was changed to read simply The Mirror, which is how the paper is often referred to in popular parlance. It had an...
, on television programming such as the Granada Reports
Granada Reports
Granada Reports is the flagship regional news programme of ITV franchisee Granada, presented by Tony Morris and Lucy Meacock, and serving the North West of England and the Isle of Man....
and Loose Women
Loose Women
Loose Women is a British lunchtime television programme, first broadcast in 1999 on ITV. It consists of a panel of four women who interview celebrities and discuss topical issues, ranging from daily politics and current affairs, to celebrity gossip...
, and by over 300 local and national radio stations. Sales of Hovis products jumped by over £12,000,000 in the weeks following the launch of Go On Lad, and over 1,000 unsolicited letters and e-mails were sent to Hovis praising the piece. The campaign received dozens of awards from the advertising and television industries, including Golds at the Creative Circle Awards, the Marketing Society Awards, and the British Television Advertising Awards. In 2009, the British public voted Go On Lad the best television commercial of the decade.
Sequence
Go On Lad begins in 1886, with an over-the-shoulders view of a boy in a flat cap and brown jacket buying a loaf of bread in a bakery. After making his purchase, the boy leaves the shop into a bustling Victorian-eraVictorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
street, narrowly avoiding being run down by a horse and cart. He is chased into an alleyway by the cart's driver, losing his flat cap in the pursuit, and he passes a poster about the Titanic. When he exits through the other side the alley, the world has moved on to the first decade of the 1900s, and a suffragette
Suffragette
"Suffragette" is a term coined by the Daily Mail newspaper as a derogatory label for members of the late 19th and early 20th century movement for women's suffrage in the United Kingdom, in particular members of the Women's Social and Political Union...
protest is underway. The boy weaves through a crowd of marching women bearing placards, emerging into an open square during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, where he spies a column of young soldiers on parade. The boy accompanies the soldiers for a few moments before peeling away to climb a nearby wall. After saluting the soldier he had marched next to, he climbs down the other side into the interbellum
Interwar period
Interwar period can refer to any period between two wars. The Interbellum is understood to be the period between the end of the Great War or First World War and the beginning of the Second World War in Europe....
, and runs past a couple engaged in a conversation beside a period car. He kicks a can through another alley, following it into another street; one in ruins from The Blitz
The Blitz
The Blitz was the sustained strategic bombing of Britain by Nazi Germany between 7 September 1940 and 10 May 1941, during the Second World War. The city of London was bombed by the Luftwaffe for 76 consecutive nights and many towns and cities across the country followed...
.
The music turns sombre for a moment as a family of refugees passes by, and an excerpt from Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
's delivery of the "We shall fight on the beaches
We shall fight on the beaches
We Shall Fight on the Beaches is a common title given to a speech delivered by Winston Churchill to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom on 4th June 1940...
" speech plays from a radio in a nearby home. A Spitfire
Supermarine Spitfire
The Supermarine Spitfire is a British single-seat fighter aircraft that was used by the Royal Air Force and many other Allied countries throughout the Second World War. The Spitfire continued to be used as a front line fighter and in secondary roles into the 1950s...
flies overhead as the boy climbs over a pile of rubble to enter a new street, in which residents were engaged in a street party
Street party
A street party can mean any type of social event taking place on a road.In Britain, these have historically been held to commemorate momentous events, such as VE Day or the Queen's Silver Jubilee, with "bunting, trestle tables covered with sandwiches and cakes, and children playing in the street"...
celebrating the accession of Elizabeth II
Proclamation of accession of Elizabeth II
Queen Elizabeth II was proclaimed sovereign of each of the Commonwealth realms on 6 and 7 February 1952, after the death of her father, King George VI, in the night between 5 February and 6 February, and while the Princess was in Kenya....
. He crawls under the table, takes a biscuit and a glass of lemonade, then runs on into 1966, where a group celebrating England's victory in the 1966 FIFA World Cup
1966 FIFA World Cup
The 1966 FIFA World Cup, the eighth staging of the World Cup, was held in England from 11 July to 30 July. England beat West Germany 4–2 in the final, winning the World Cup for the first time, so becoming the first host to win the tournament since Italy in 1934.-Host selection:England was chosen as...
chant "Champions!" as they pass him in a car. From here, changes to the boys costume are made with every transition, reflecting the fashions of the periods he passes through. Farther down the road from 1966, the boy passes a British Asian
British Asian
British Asian is a term used to describe British citizens who descended from mainly South Asia, also known as South Asians in the United Kingdom...
couple in the 1970s, reflecting the spike in immigration in the community during that period. He turns a corner, running into a conflict between police and striking miners
UK miners' strike (1984–1985)
The UK miners' strike was a major industrial action affecting the British coal industry. It was a defining moment in British industrial relations, and its defeat significantly weakened the British trades union movement...
in the 1980s. One of the miners jeers the boy, and he continues running. As he runs alongside a river during the Millennium celebrations on New Year's Day
New Year's Day
New Year's Day is observed on January 1, the first day of the year on the modern Gregorian calendar as well as the Julian calendar used in ancient Rome...
2000, fireworks go off in the background. Finally, the boy makes a turn into a council estate in 2008 and sits down with the loaf of bread at his kitchen table. His mother calls to him, 'Is that you home, love?', to which the boy replies 'Yeah'. And the piece closes on a shot of the boy's hand reaching for a slice of the Hovis loaf over the tagline "As good today as it's always been."
Background
From 1967 to 2007, the HovisHovis
Hovis is a UK brand of flour and bread, owned by Premier Foods. The brand, which began in 1886, ended up as part of Rank Hovis McDougall in 1962 after a succession of mergers. RHM, whose bread making division has been known as British Bakeries since 1955, also owns the Mother's Pride and Nimble...
brand of bread
Bread
Bread is a staple food prepared by cooking a dough of flour and water and often additional ingredients. Doughs are usually baked, but in some cuisines breads are steamed , fried , or baked on an unoiled frying pan . It may be leavened or unleavened...
was owned by Rank Hovis McDougall, and for much of that time was the market leader in the United Kingdom. However, following a "chop and change" marketing strategy, including several "confused" brand relaunches through the first half of the 2000s, rival brand Warburtons
Warburtons
Warburtons is a British baking firm based founded by Thomas Warburton in 1876 in Bolton, then in Lancashire, now in Greater Manchester, England. For much of its history Warburtons only had bakeries in Lancashire and it remains a family-owned company....
had increased sales and profits, and in 2006 both brands had approximately 28% of the £1.6b UK bread market. The situation continued to worsen after Premier Foods
Premier Foods
Premier Foods plc is a British food manufacturer headquartered in St Albans, Hertfordshire. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.-History:...
purchased Rank Hovis McDougall in 2007, taking on debt to do so. Despite continuing to show profits of £387m, Hovis continued to lose ground to Warburtons. Sales of the latter had increased by 24% in 2007 alone; by 2008, for every two loaves of Hovis sold in the UK, Warburtons sold three. The continuing failure of the brand began to affect Premier Foods as a whole, with the company's share price
Share price
A share price is the price of a single share of a number of saleable stocks of a company. Once the stock is purchased, the owner becomes a shareholder of the company that issued the share.-Behavior of share prices:...
dropping from £3.50 to £1.80 in the 18 months following the acquisition.
Despite this, Hovis was still a valuable brand. Its reported profits, while declining, still amounted to £387m, making it the fourth largest grocery brand in the UK, behind Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola is a carbonated soft drink sold in stores, restaurants, and vending machines in more than 200 countries. It is produced by The Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, Georgia, and is often referred to simply as Coke...
, Warburtons, and Walkers Crisps. Premier Foods hired a new head of marketing, Jon Goldstone, known for a strong branding background at Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble is a Fortune 500 American multinational corporation headquartered in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio and manufactures a wide range of consumer goods....
. Goldstone quickly identified the issue facing Hovis, surmising that "[Hovis] had got into a situation where Warburtons was synonymous with healthier bread from real bakeries and Kingsmill had cornered the value end of the market. We were being squeezed and were falling fast." Goldstone's solution was to re-launch the brand, changing the formula of the bread, redesigning the packaging, and putting £15m into a new advertising campaign. To this end, Premier Foods consolidated its marketing across all brands into two advertising agencies
Advertising agency
An advertising agency or ad agency is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising for its clients. An ad agency is independent from the client and provides an outside point of view to the effort of selling the client's products or services...
, Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy (MCBD) and McCann Erickson
McCann Erickson
McCann Erickson is a global advertising agency network, with offices in more than 130 countries. McCann is a subsidiary of the Interpublic Group of Companies, one of the four large holding companies in the advertising industry....
, with the former taking on Hovis. The relaunch was the first campaign by MCBD for the brand, though it had done work on other Premier Foods labels in the past.
Production
In April 2008, Goldstone met with the creative directorCreative Director
A creative director is a position often found within the graphic design, film, music, fashion, advertising, media or entertainment industries, but may be useful in other creative organizations such as web development and software development firms as well....
of MCBD, Danny Brooke-Taylor, to discuss the advertising campaign which was to accompany the relaunch. The two reviewed previous Hovis advertising for ideas, paying particular attention to the 1973 television advertisement Boy On Bike. Directed by Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott
Sir Ridley Scott is an English film director and producer. His most famous films include The Duellists , Alien , Blade Runner , Legend , Thelma & Louise , G. I...
, Boy On Bike was an iconic piece of British culture; in a 2003 poll, over 60% of British people over 40 years old could still hum the theme used in the commercial ("New World Symphony by Dvorak
Dvorák
- Dvořák or Dvorak :* Ann Dvorak , American film actress* Antonín Dvořák , Czech composer of Romantic music* August Dvorak , American psychologist, co-creator of the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard...
), and in 2006 it was voted the greatest advertising campaign of all time by the public. From this, the campaign's theme was established: nostalgia. A pitch was put together by creative team
Creative Director
A creative director is a position often found within the graphic design, film, music, fashion, advertising, media or entertainment industries, but may be useful in other creative organizations such as web development and software development firms as well....
Gavin Horrance and Danny Hunt of MCBD, comprising a set of "mood films" constructed from stock footage, and the idea of "the perilous journey a young boy takes through 122 years of British history to bring the small brown load back to his mam." The pitch was presented to Qualitative Assessment, a focus group
Focus group
A focus group is a form of qualitative research in which a group of people are asked about their perceptions, opinions, beliefs and attitudes towards a product, service, concept, advertisement, idea, or packaging...
of consumers, where it met a very positive response. From there, Goldman took the proposal directly to Robert Schofield, the head of Premier Foods, who greenlit the project immediately. A budget of £1,000,000 was put aside for production of the commercial alone, over three times as much as had ever been spent on production of a Premier Foods commercial to that date.
With permission to go ahead, MCBD began searching for a director
Film director
A film director is a person who directs the actors and film crew in filmmaking. They control a film's artistic and dramatic nathan roach, while guiding the technical crew and actors.-Responsibilities:...
to lead the production, eventually settling on Ringan Ledwidge. Ledwidge, who was working with Daniel Kleinman
Daniel Kleinman
Daniel Kleinman is a British television commercial and music video director who was title sequence designer for the James Bond series of films from 1995's GoldenEye until he was replaced by MK12 for 2008's Quantum of Solace....
at the London-based production company
Production company
A production company provides the physical basis for works in the realms of the performing arts, new media art, film, television, radio, and video.- Tasks and functions :...
Rattling Stick, had a reputation for good work on "magical realism" projects, with previous work including Forever for Volkswagen
Volkswagen
Volkswagen is a German automobile manufacturer and is the original and biggest-selling marque of the Volkswagen Group, which now also owns the Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, SEAT, and Škoda marques and the truck manufacturer Scania.Volkswagen means "people's car" in German, where it is...
in 2002, and Rewind City for Orange earlier in 2008. The Hovis campaign, now assigned the title Go On Lad, was the most expensive and complex commercial Ledwidge had directed to date.
With only four months set aside for production of the commercial, work began in earnest on scouting for locations
Location scouting
Location scouting is a vital process in the pre-production stage of filmmaking and commercial photography. Once scriptwriters, producers or directors have decided what general kind of scenery they require for the various parts of their work that is shot outside of the studio, the search for a...
and cast capable of presenting the desired tone for Go On Lad. Several locations across the United Kingdom were looked at as potential sites for the six-day shoot, but while the producers of Boy On Bike had dressed a street in Dorset
Dorset
Dorset , is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The county town is Dorchester which is situated in the south. The Hampshire towns of Bournemouth and Christchurch joined the county with the reorganisation of local government in 1974...
to appear Northern
Northern England
Northern England, also known as the North of England, the North or the North Country, is a cultural region of England. It is not an official government region, but rather an informal amalgamation of counties. The southern extent of the region is roughly the River Trent, while the North is bordered...
, Ledwidge opted to film in Northern England itself. Liverpool
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...
's Sweeting Street was dressed for use as the setting for the opening Victorian scene, while Falkner Street appeared as the interbellum scene. Workers for the City Council
Liverpool City Council
Liverpool City Council is the governing body for the city of Liverpool in Merseyside, England. It consists of 90 councillors, three for each of the city's 30 wards. The council is currently controlled by the Labour Party and is led by Joe Anderson.-Domain:...
partially demolished three buildings to set the scene for the Blitz section, bringing in over fifty tonnes of rubble for the set dressing. Locals of Hardy Street in Garston
Garston, Merseyside
Garston is a district of Liverpool, Merseyside, England. It is bordered by Aigburth, Allerton, and Speke.-History:Gaerstun, meaning 'grazing settlement' or 'grazing farm' in Old English, is one possible root of the name....
were recruited as extras for the Coronation scene, which was filmed at that location.
In all, over 750 people were hired to act as extras in Go On Lad, including over 200 members of historical reenactment
Historical reenactment
Historical reenactment is an educational activity in which participants attempt torecreate some aspects of a historical event or period. This may be as narrow as a specific moment from a battle, such as the reenactment of Pickett's Charge at the Great Reunion of 1913, or as broad as an entire...
societies for the World War I scene alone. In casting for the role of the boy, Ledwidge wanted to eschew the "stylised blonde healthy child seen in most modern European advertising" in favour of someone who would evoke memories of the actors in productions such as Kes
Kes (film)
Kes is a 1969 British film from director Ken Loach and producer Tony Garnett. The film is based on the novel A Kestrel for a Knave, written by the Barnsley-born author Barry Hines in 1968...
or Great Expectations
Great Expectations
Great Expectations is a novel by Charles Dickens. It was first published in serial form in the publication All the Year Round from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. It has been adapted for stage and screen over 250 times....
. The boy eventually settled on for the role was Brian Mackie, a thirteen-year-old with no prior acting experience.
Post-production
Post-productionPost-production
Post-production is part of filmmaking and the video production process. It occurs in the making of motion pictures, television programs, radio programs, advertising, audio recordings, photography, and digital art...
was contracted to The Mill
The Mill (post-production)
The Mill is a post-production and visual effects company launched in 1990 with offices in London, New York and Los Angeles.The Mill's Film special effects subsidiary, Mill Film, won an Oscar for its work on the film Gladiator. The Mill was the first UK-based post-production company to set up...
, who were given the brief to make it appear as though no computer-generated imagery
Computer-generated imagery
Computer-generated imagery is the application of the field of computer graphics or, more specifically, 3D computer graphics to special effects in art, video games, films, television programs, commercials, simulators and simulation generally, and printed media...
or other visual effects
Visual effects
Visual effects are the various processes by which imagery is created and/or manipulated outside the context of a live action shoot. Visual effects involve the integration of live-action footage and generated imagery to create environments which look realistic, but would be dangerous, costly, or...
had been used at all. The majority of the visual effects work was done using the Autodesk
Autodesk Media and Entertainment
Autodesk Media and Entertainment, formerly Discreet, is based in Montreal, Quebec as the entertainment division of Autodesk. This division produces software used in feature films, television commercials and computer games. It also provides products for management and distribution to complement its...
software Flame
IFF (software)
Inferno, Flame and Flint is a series of compositing and visual effects applications made by Autodesk Media and Entertainment. They share the same software base, but differ mainly in hardware configuration. Traditionally Inferno ran on the SGI Onyx series, while Flame and Flint ran on the SGI...
and Maya. This included simple work such as removing anachronistic
Anachronism
An anachronism—from the Greek ανά and χρόνος — is an inconsistency in some chronological arrangement, especially a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other...
yellow road markings, satellite dishes, and replacing PVC windows. More complex work included the removal of several buildings with modern architectural styles or features, the creation of a CGI colliery, a Spitfire
Supermarine Spitfire
The Supermarine Spitfire is a British single-seat fighter aircraft that was used by the Royal Air Force and many other Allied countries throughout the Second World War. The Spitfire continued to be used as a front line fighter and in secondary roles into the 1950s...
and a Concorde
Concorde
Aérospatiale-BAC Concorde was a turbojet-powered supersonic passenger airliner, a supersonic transport . It was a product of an Anglo-French government treaty, combining the manufacturing efforts of Aérospatiale and the British Aircraft Corporation...
jet aeroplane (which was later cut in editing), crowd multiplication for the striking miners and suffragettes, and the recreation of the Millennial fireworks display.
For editing
Editing
Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, and film media used to convey information through the processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate, and complete...
of the commercial, Ledwidge looked to Richard Orrick, an editor he had collaborated with several times in the past. Several angles had been shot for each scene, as well as a number of cutaway
Cutaway
Cutaway may refer to:*Cutaway van chassis, an incomplete vehicle for further assembly by a manufacturer of conversion vans, RVs, ambulances, etc*Cutaway , a film-making technique...
s establishing the era that the boy was travelling through. However, the brief for the commercial was specifically for a 122-second cut, one second for every year since the establishment of Hovis in 1886. For this reason, and to reinforce the viewer's connection with the boy, almost every shot which didn't feature Mackie was cut. Additional editing work was done to smooth the transitions between eras and maintain a steady pace within the commercial's narrative. Until half-way through editing, the music accompanying Go On Lad was to have been "Town Called Malice
Town Called Malice
"Town Called Malice" is a song recorded by The Jam from the album The Gift. It reached number one in the UK singles chart.-Song profile:It was a double A-side single release featuring "Precious" as the flip side...
" by The Jam
The Jam
The Jam were an English punk rock/New Wave/mod revival band active during the late 1970s and early 1980s. They were formed in Woking, Surrey. While they shared the "angry young men" outlook and fast tempos of their punk rock contemporaries, The Jam wore smartly tailored suits rather than ripped...
. However, after the right to use the piece had been purchased, alterations to the pacing of the narrative led Ledwidge to commission a new piece from the Mancunian independent act Working for a Nuclear Free City
Working for a Nuclear Free City
Working for a Nuclear Free City is a band from Manchester, England.-History:Original members Phil Kay and Gary McClure formed as a studio entity in 1999; WFANFC began performing live in 2004, after adding drummer Jon Kay and bassist Ed Hulme to the group...
, titled "History".
Release
The campaign surrounding Go On Lad was conducted on a budget of £15m, and comprised extensive public relations work by Frank PR, the launch of a new Hovis website, new packaging using a bolder typeface and stronger colours, the re-launch of the unsliced "little brown loaf" featured in the campaign, and changes to the formulae of other Hovis lines, as well as a series of in-store deals and promotionsSales promotion
Sales promotion is one of the four aspects of promotional mix. Media and non-media marketing communication are employed for a pre-determined, limited time to increase consumer demand, stimulate market demand or improve product availability...
.
Public relations work in the lead-up to the release of Go On Lad included stunts such as the deliberate leaking of a false rumour that footballer Wayne Rooney
Wayne Rooney
Wayne Mark Rooney is an English footballer who plays as a striker for Premier League club Manchester United and the England national team...
would be appearing in the ad as the new face of Hovis, the inclusion of several tabloid journalists as extras in the production, and the release of a making-of documentary featuring extra scenes, behind-the-scenes footage, and interviews with the cast and crew. The impact of the PR work was such that the Hovis campaign received an estimated £2.5m of free publicity even before Go On Lads first broadcast, prompting competitors Kingsmill and Warburtons to vastly increase the number of in-store special offers and deals on their products as a defence tactic in the four weeks leading up to the ad's debut.
The first broadcast of Go On Lad was at 8:45pm on Friday 12 September 2008, as the final advertisement of a commercial break in the popular soap opera
Soap opera
A soap opera, sometimes called "soap" for short, is an ongoing, episodic work of dramatic fiction presented in serial format on radio or as television programming. The name soap opera stems from the original dramatic serials broadcast on radio that had soap manufacturers, such as Procter & Gamble,...
Coronation Street
Coronation Street
Coronation Street is a British soap opera set in Weatherfield, a fictional town in Greater Manchester based on Salford. Created by Tony Warren, Coronation Street was first broadcast on 9 December 1960...
. ITV
ITV
ITV is the major commercial public service TV network in the United Kingdom. Launched in 1955 under the auspices of the Independent Television Authority to provide competition to the BBC, it is also the oldest commercial network in the UK...
, the broadcaster of Coronation Street, were persuaded to cut the length of the programme by two seconds to accommodate the ad's unusual 122-second length. The full version of the commercial continued to air in cinemas for four weeks, with 90- and 10-second cuts appearing on television into early 2009.
Reception
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