In what looks like a shameless bid to shill their crusty loaves to a younger audience, Hovis’s latest advert follows three children as they decide to ditch their games console, don their bike helmets and go for a ride in the great outdoors. Sounds implausible, right? Listen to what happens next: the walls of their house come alive with the aid of some low-budget CGI and chase the kids in order to trap them indoors.
Questions abound. Why has Hovis swapped its usual bakers in flat caps for kids in bike helmets? Why is it launching an advert about getting out of the house in chilly October? Why have the producers gone for a pseudo-Harry Potter soundtrack more than a decade after the first Harry Potter film came out? Why does the narrator contradict himself by saying, “Don’t stay indoors” followed by “Hovis: good inside”? And finally, why is a bread brand marketing itself directly towards kids, as if a child in a supermarket with a spare £1 would spend it on anything other than a shitload of Haribo?
Despite my many qualms, however, I can’t argue with the advert’s core concept: get out the house, it says, emphasising all the endurance Hovis will give you with the catchy strapline, “pack a sandwich, and go on”. Suddenly I imagine all the times I’ve found myself flagging in a club smoking area at four in the morning, stomach churning, my one ounce of sense successfully urging me to call it a night. “If only I’d packed a Hovis sandwich,” I now think, “like those clever 11-year-olds on TV, then I too could have gone on and on…”
