The Ad That Gave Me a Nosebleed (in a Good Way)
Last week I fell down a rabbit hole. It started with a 15-second YouTube pre-roll ad for a hiking boot. Nothing flash. A dirt path, some crunching gravel, a close-up of laces being tied. But then, this sound. A single, delicate breath recorded so close it felt like I was borrowing someone else's lungs. And that was it.
I watched it 14 times. Not because I care about hiking (I don’t), but because something there worked harder than most. It was a perfect storm of ambient sound design, near-monastic restraint in the cut, and a refusal to shout. It whispered. And that anti-bravado did something primal. The brand, a tiny New Zealand boot company I’d never heard of, resisted every temptation to over-explain. No founder backstory. No fast-paced montage. Just a boot. A path. A breath.
It made me realise how rare it is for ads to leave room for the viewer. We cram every second with justification, benefits, slogans, jingles, back-end deals. But in the space between things, there’s magic. Restraint, in an overfed attention economy, is radical. And we need more of it. Especially here, where kiwi campaigns often try to out-clever each other. Sometimes the cleverest thing you can do is shut up and let the image twitch.
So here’s my tiny hill to die on: more brands should take a vow of marketing silence. Just for a week. Don’t fill the frame. Don’t narrate everything. Learn from that hiking ad. Trust that we can find meaning in a breath. That we want to.
I watched it 14 times. Not because I care about hiking (I don’t), but because something there worked harder than most. It was a perfect storm of ambient sound design, near-monastic restraint in the cut, and a refusal to shout. It whispered. And that anti-bravado did something primal. The brand, a tiny New Zealand boot company I’d never heard of, resisted every temptation to over-explain. No founder backstory. No fast-paced montage. Just a boot. A path. A breath.
It made me realise how rare it is for ads to leave room for the viewer. We cram every second with justification, benefits, slogans, jingles, back-end deals. But in the space between things, there’s magic. Restraint, in an overfed attention economy, is radical. And we need more of it. Especially here, where kiwi campaigns often try to out-clever each other. Sometimes the cleverest thing you can do is shut up and let the image twitch.
So here’s my tiny hill to die on: more brands should take a vow of marketing silence. Just for a week. Don’t fill the frame. Don’t narrate everything. Learn from that hiking ad. Trust that we can find meaning in a breath. That we want to.