Greek Mythology meets Multivitamins

I’ve got a super awesome insight for everyone: Feedings kids things that taste horrible is hard. Wow. Genius. Tricking the children makes them eat the yucky healthy thing. What?! Yes, it’s true.

Hopefully you managed to gather my intensely sarcastic tone there. Vital multivitamins for kids have decided to use one the most obvious insight ever and the take an equally obvious metaphors for their latest campaign. The Trojan horse. Only they’ve taken this ancient Greek story and applied it to what looks like medieval England. Very, very strange.

“Why have they applied it to medieval England?” you might ask. “Why not Greece?” I literally have no idea. It could be an art direction choice, what with castles being better looking buildings. It’s also possible that the advert was just misnamed. Admittedly if I had seen it without its name I might have just assumed it was catapult or something, and then the advert would make absolutely no sense.

Maybe over analyzing it is what has ruined this advert. It is very pretty with a wonderful illustration and on first glance it kind of makes sense. Page flip and done for most people. For me, who has squinted trying to understand this thing for close on ten minutes, it is the most jumbled mash of nonsense I’ve ever seen.

Apart from the visual, I really struggle to understand the copy. To me “delicious gets the good in” is just a random selection of words strung together. I understand how it makes sense in the case of the sweetie-vitamins but as a general statement it’s just wrong. 99.999999% of the time delicious gets the bad in. When linking it to the visual it still makes no sense. I may be going too far into the metaphor here but are they saying that the soldiers inside the horse are “the good”? Because that is just historically wrong.  I guess in some sense the vitamins are sneaky soldiers but “good” is just the wrong word.

I don’t expect lyrical genius from a company whose tagline is “Good Health is Vital”; I just expect it to somehow stick to basic sentence structure.

Over all this is one of the most confusing adverts I have seen in a very long time. None of the elements are working together or explaining anything. As I have said however, at a quick glance this could be very cute and memorable.