OLYMPUS | CROPPED TOURISTS | 2005
The Tourist Whose Head Got Cropped Out Is Screaming at the Door / OLYMPUS "CROPPED TOURISTS"
This is one of a series of TV commercials Olympus ran in Europe in 2005. The campaign used dark humor to depict "photo failures," and it won a Gold Lion at Cannes. But at the time, it reportedly split opinion.
The idea
There's a loud knock on the apartment door. The man looks through the peephole and sees an elderly couple standing there—with their heads cut off. "Mr. Harland, please stop following me," the man says, but the couple won't back down: "You promised you'd send us the photo of the Eiffel Tower!" The man flees to his bed and pulls the sheet over his head, but outside the door they keep shouting, "Come out! We're not moving!" At the end, the copy reads, "Headless tourists: delete, or email?", promoting the wide-angle feature of the Olympus C-7070 Wide Zoom.
What happened
The campaign also included other dark-humor spots like "Red-Eyed Baby" and "Distorted Dogs," and the series won a Gold Lion at Cannes. That said, the dark approach reportedly also drew some negative reactions.
Afterthought
It's a paradoxical way to sell a digital camera's features—by playing on the fear of ruining your photos. These days, with smartphones, you can just retake a shot as many times as you like, but back in 2005, digital cameras were still at a stage where people worried about whether a photo would actually turn out right. There's something impressive about the nerve it took to turn that anxiety into something like a horror movie. The work was made by Springer & Jacoby, a renowned German agency, and this campaign is said to have become the agency's last great work.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2005
