Product: Kowloon Motor Bus' (KMB) civic education campaign.
Title: Guide Dog.
Ad agency: Chan Tsang Wong Chu & Mee Advertising.
First impression: clever and punchy with deadpan wit; this could only be a KMB ad.
Storyboard: two labradors wearing sunglasses sit on the roadside having a chat. One says: 'Quill, why are the other dogs running so late?' Quill (named after a recent Japanese box-office hit about a guide dog) replies: 'It's too bad. They can't take buses.' Then a line comes up at the top of the screen: 'Only guide dogs are allowed on KMB buses.'
This 10-second clip is just one of a string of 15 ads that have won the bus company awards, including a gold at the Effie Awards this year and that for outstanding TV campaign at last year's HKMA/TVB Awards for Marketing Excellence. Others include: Safety Belt, in which a male dancer forgets to belt up, causing, to the horror of his partner, his trousers to fall off while doing the twist; and Handrail, in which a fireman refuses to slide down a pole because the fire engine is about to depart and he has to 'hold on to the handrail'.
What the client says: the head of corporate communications at KMB, Susanne Ho, says: 'After Sars, towards the end of 2003, we felt we needed to do something to boost social morale, but times were tough and we didn't have a budget to do much. Then we discovered that one of the local TV
