Freelander 2 with panoramic sunroof.

I love snakes. When I first saw this ad, it took me a short while to actually notice the person in the image, I was thinking about the snake.

I find it hard to believe that people can be afraid of snakes. If it were the poison that people were so frightened of, then maybe it would make a little more sense. But it isn’t, it is the snakes themselves that cause such horror.

I learnt to love snakes (or not to hate them) in the third grade. I imagine that no child from my third grade class could possibly have developed a phobia of snakes, because we were surrounded by them, every day, all year long. Our teacher bred snakes, and so the walls of our classroom were lined with glass tanks containing carpet snakes, red-bellied black snakes, a blind python, a death adder (no kidding. Whoever spelled all their weekly words correctly got the honour of feeding it a rat on Friday afternoon), and an array of lizards and reptiles. It was awesome.

So I am completely oblivious to whatever it is that makes people squirm at snakes; I think they are beautiful.

This ad, on the other hand….

I can’t remember any specific instances, but I get the feeling this has been done before. It certainly hasn’t been effective in raising my curiosities about this fantastic panoramic sunroof (I even had to go back and look at the image then to remember what the ad was even about). It will probably just make people squirm because they hate snakes, squirm because they love them, or just plain squirm.

Advertising Agency: Filadelfia, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Creative Director: Dan Zecchinelli
Art Director: João Paz
Copywriter: Leandro Neves
Photographers: Pedro Gravatá / Stock archive
Other additional credits:
Digital retouching: Aderson Fagundes
Published: March 2009

Related Story

Rate this Ad  Loading ...

Free Subscription

eMail Subscription