Chicken
Mercedes-Benz2013
Chicken is a 2013 45-second television commercial for Mercedes-Benz, created by Jung von Matt/Neckar, Stuttgart.
The line
Stabilität in jeder Situation. Magic Body Control.
Why it works
To Diana Ross's "Upside Down", handlers lift, sway and twist live chickens, and while the birds' bodies dance in every direction, their heads stay locked perfectly still. Only at the end does the analogy land, with the line "Stabilität in jeder Situation" (stability in every situation) and the name Magic Body Control, the new S-Class suspension that scans the road for bumps and adjusts itself automatically. Created by Jung von Matt/Neckar in Stuttgart and directed by Daniel Warwick, it is studied as a model of demonstration by analogy, turning an invisible piece of engineering into a sight gag anyone can grasp in seconds. Released online in September 2013 ahead of its German TV run, it topped Horizont and Google's September ranking of YouTube ads in Germany, with more than five million views. It won the only D&AD Yellow Pencil awarded to German work in 2014, and readers of the car magazine Auto Express later voted it car ad of the year with 51% of the vote.
Techniques
- Demonstration Handlers sway live chickens whose heads stay perfectly still, a visual analogy that makes invisible suspension engineering easy to grasp.
- Humour Sets the swaying, head-steady chickens to Diana Ross as a sight gag anyone gets in seconds, before the product point lands.
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