Gap | Boyfriend Trousers | 2017
Steal the pants, put them on, nail the pose. / Gap "Boyfriend Trousers"
I found myself clapping. Claire Danes and Patrick Wilson dance and sing, and at the end, she yanks the trousers off the guy and puts them on herself to strike a pose. And it looks so, so good.
The insight
Gap's ads from the late 1990s through the early 2000s were plain and simple. But around this time, they seem to have shifted hard toward product and storytelling. There are so many different ways to make people want something, and an ad with this kind of "movie-like" aftertaste is incredibly instructive to study.
The idea
Set to the song "Anything You Can Do," Claire Danes and Patrick Wilson sing and dance together. Then, at the end, the woman pulls the trousers off the man (!) and puts them on herself to strike a pose. It's an idea that literally embodies the product name, Boyfriend Trousers.
Afterthought
It's just a 15- or 30-second commercial, but the feeling it leaves you with afterward—like, "wait, was I just watching a movie?"—I love that. Which really just means the production team worked incredibly hard. Watching something like this makes me want to try harder too.
