Washington Post, April 10, 1991, by Paul Span "Ads With Instant Intrigue. For Taster's Choice, the 45- Second Soap Opera" ----------------------------------------------------------- In the first episode, she's run out of coffee mid-dinner party and borrows a jar from her attractive male neighbor. They exchange half-smiles, provocative glances and more eyebrow activity than has been seen on television since Groucho Marx, but nothing much happens except that they discuss the merits of Taster's Choice. The encounter might have gone largely unremarked upon amid the clutter of commercials -- another nicely produced attempt to convince skeptical Americans that instant coffee is worth drinking and that one brand transcends another -- except that now there's a second episode. She returns the jar, prompting another volley of teasing looks and quirked brows; he's entertaining another woman, but the prospect of a subsequent and more intimate rendezvous is left open. Well. This isn't just an ad campaign; it's a narrative, a soap, one of the few instances ad people can recall of serialized commercial-making on network television. "We're writing a movie," says Matt Lester, the campaign's art director, "and we're going to cut it up in 45-second pieces." The third spot in the series will be shot this summer and debut in the fall. The caffeinated romance is a direct steal from a British campaign launched in 1987 to sell Nescafe Gold Blend, which, like Taster's Choice, is a freeze-dried instant coffee made by Nestle Beverage Co. The U.K. version, dreamed up and produced by McCann-Erickson in London, has been a smash, extending to seven episodes and turning its actors into celebrities; it's credited with boosting sales of the brand 20 to 30 percent. McCann-Erickson in New York, the ad agency for Taster's Choice, was impressed. Those upscale dinner party scenes and "Masterpiece Theatre" accents might work equally well here for a "premium" brand that costs 10 to 20 percent more than its competitors, the ad team figured. The U.S. version, accordingly, features the same flirty actors (Tony Head and Sharon Maughan by name), the same director and virtually the same scripts. But not quite. In Britain the man -- working at home when his knockout neighbor rings his doorbell -- is wearing a tie. A tie? At home? In the more casual American spot, written by Irwin Warren, Tony Head goes tieless. In the second commercial, in which he has company, he apologetically says, "I'm busy right now." A slight revision: In the U.K. he said he was "in the middle of something," a line that would have sounded odd to American ears. In fact, Head largely neutralized his British accent for the American commercials. In Britain, where people are more attuned to such nuance, viewers could tell from the pair's speech that she was an upper-class swell and that he was a regular Joe. "It adds to the intrigue; there's a difference between them," Lester explains. Here, the same effect is achieved by letting Maughan keep her rounded British vowels. (A mildly insulting notion, that American speech denotes inferior social status. But consider this: Those Brits who use coffee -- a minority in a tea-drinking nation -- buy instant 80 to 90 percent of the time. That's high class? Less than 30 percent of the coffee sold in the United States, by contrast, is instant.) Anyway, Nestle is betting more than $ 20 million -- last year's advertising expenditures for Taster's Choice, according to the researchers at Leading National Advertisers -- that Americans will become as caught up in the liaison as the British, and as willing to buy more of its instant coffee. Taster's Choice, being more expensive, is already the "dollar leader" in the $ 900 million U.S. instant coffee business, but it generally runs third in market share behind leader Maxwell House and runner-up Folger's. Few national advertisers have tried to keep American viewers hooked on a continuing story line. The four-parter that Pepsi unveiled in 1988, in which Michael Jackson was pursued by rabid fans, was something of a gimmick, the commercials shown only once, on the Grammy Awards broadcast. Backer Spielvogel Bates has made a few "to be continued" commercials for Miller Lite, but they have been tied to promotions like sweepstakes and have run for only two or three months. McCann-Erickson, however, is hoping to sustain the Taster's Choice chronicle for several years. "This campaign will go on as long as everybody stays interested," says account supervisor Stuart Klein. So far the public is. Nestle's headquarters in San Francisco has received hundreds of letters about the campaign, an uncommon response. A few correspondents picked the usual nits (the other woman in the second episode ended her sentence with a preposition, someone felt compelled to point out), but most thought the campaign reeked of class. Three lifestyle writers at the Detroit Free Press suggested that in subsequent commercials, the couple should honeymoon in Colombia and that, post-divorce, she could take up with Juan Valdez. The Baltimore Sun has announced a write-in contest to solicit readers' recommendations for the campaign's conclusion. In the British saga, Maughan and Head meet by chance in Episode 3 and go out for dinner in Episode 4. There follows "some subsequent conflict" caused by "a misunderstanding about another man," Lester relates. "Their relationship hits sort of a snag that's resolved in the following spot. They make up" -- with a decorous kiss -- "in the latest spot." It is giving away nothing to recount this, since the American commercials, which "broke" late last year, will henceforth depart from the British prototype. The ad folks are naturally tight-lipped about the plot, except to say that the romance will unfold as unpredictably as in real life, sort of. Real-life lovers generally seem less likely to natter on so about coffee. Photo: Sharon Maughan and Tony Head in a Taster's Choice commercial. ----------------------------------------------------------- Bentley's Bedlam http://www.BetsyDa.com/bedlam.html This website is for information and entertainment purposes only and is not intended to infringe on copyrights held by others.