CENTRAAL BEHEER | BOX | 1993
This Is a Story About the Titanic / CENTRAAL BEHEER "BOX"
A group of men risk their lives carrying a heavy wooden crate marked "fragile" toward a ship. They nearly drop it again and again, narrowly saving it each time—and then, right at the end, the camera slowly zooms in on the ship's name. That's where fate takes its turn.
The problem
The Dutch insurance company Centraal Beheer has been running a campaign series called "Even Apeldoorn bellen" ("Just call Apeldoorn") since 1985. The usual format: someone causes a huge comical mess, and it all lands on the slogan at the end.
The insight
No matter how carefully you protect something, sometimes fate just can't be beaten—and this ad turns that very truth about insurance straight into a joke. By making a box marked "fragile" the star, it keeps the audience on edge wondering "will it be okay?" the whole way through, then flips it into an outrageous punchline right at the very end.
The idea
Four men carry the heavy wooden crate to the harbor, and along the way it nearly ends in disaster again and again. It's safely loaded onto the ship, and just barely survives a moment when the cable seems about to snap—or so it seems, until the camera slowly zooms in on the ship's name. The costumes were authentic pieces from 1912, and the ad was shot in Southampton and Chatham in southern England.
What happened
Filming was completed in just three days. The ad won Gold at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Afterthought
What's amazing is there's no setup at all—the whole punchline rests on just one thing: the ship's name. The laugh comes the instant viewers realize the meaning for themselves, and that kind of craft was already perfected back in 1993. By the way, it seems audiences naturally started calling it "the Titanic ad."
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 1993
