128. 1984 Creative Guild’s Radio Ad of the Year: GILLETTE’s RUBIE BLADE, “Harana” RC 30s.

The Creative Guild’s very frst radio ad of the year drew inspiration from the popular slice-of-life format, but further injected situations with a delightful brand of anticlimactic Pinoy humor.

As Bill Ibañez, then associate creative director of McCann-Erickson, now creative director at Great Wall Avertising and father of the RUBIE “Harana” 30-seconder ad, likes to say “Humor is my specialty. And Filipinos love it when a situation has a humorous twist.”

Source: flickr, Arne Kuilman

The client was Gillette Philippines, a 15-odd-year associate of McCann-Erickson, and the product was RUBIE Blade. When Ibañez took over the account, a popular campaign and a TV campaign starring the late comedian Vic Pacia were already airing. Client wanted to employ radio to encourage the men in downscale rural market to please shave.

“A lot of men out there were still using primitive implements to get rid of their bristles.” Ibañez explains. Such grooming innovations included two coins used as a makeshift tweezers or even splinters of wood. That is, if the gentleman ever bothered with his bristles at all.

Ibañez decided to utilize the popular jingle , which made a simple but very attractive promise, If you shaved with RUBIE, you would look good. “Ahit RUBIE, Ahit Pogi”—the eqution of the brand name with a Filipino slang for “handsome” was only of the cmpaign’s winning elements. Ibañez went a step further by pushing the satisfied user over the deep end; the hero becomes so handsome that, by the end of the commercial, he has a new problem altogether, “He becomes too good-looking for his own good.”

In “Harana”, only one of the several presentations of the delicious RUBIE dilemma, a fellow with the unsavory name of Tiagong Tuchang pays court to Kathleen, whose mother immediately puts the light out on the suitor because of his unshaven state. Calling him “tuchang” , a terribly coarse kind of bristle, is bad enough. “Yung hindi nag-aahit! Yung mukhang piña!”, the mother exclaims, and the listener goes to town figuring out how unbelievably fuzzy Tiago really looks.

RUBIE is presented as a resolution, and the playing of the jingle signifies that the hero has taken matters an razor into his own hands. He returns to Kathleen, who is so taken by the serenade (and the newly-trimmed serenade) that she asks for an encore. The crow of  rooster and a young man’s moan, “Josko, umaga na!” is the final twist and the hilarious revelation of just how many encores the now desirable Tiago was obliged to give.

Listeners began to await the next RUBIE Blade radio commercial like radio drama or comic installments, “The listener knew it was an exaggeration, because there was no attempt to present the situation as logical,” Ibañez recalls. Thus, they laughed heartily at the final turn of events, which, in subsequent versions, always had the hero ending up with more than he bargained for—as in a shotgun wedding, pehaps, or having more than one barrio lass demanding his attention.

From the distinguishing sound effects that set the ads apart from auditory clutter—a series of urgent knocks, or, in the case of “Harana”, the strum of a guitar---to the familiar characters and easily recognizable values, the RUBIE ads hit the Pinoy at his very heart. “They were indigenous and romantic,” Ibañez says. “The strength of the campaign was in fact that people recognized themselves in it.”

Enough to keep RUBIE Blade in the market for years to come.

CREDITS:

ADVERTISER: Gillette Philippines

PRODUCT: Rubie Blades

AGENCY: McCann-Erickson

ASSOCITE CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Bill Ibañez

PRODUCER: Baby Enriquez

SOURCES:

Article written by the late Butch Uy, forPerfect 10: A Decade of Creativity in Philippine Advertising, written by Butch Uy.Published by the Executive Committee of the Creative Guild of the Philippines. 1995, p. 66-67