A very likable ice cream TV commercial

There are now more than 500 million active users on Facebook worldwide, 50 percent of whom log in at any given day. An average user has 130 friends and spends over 700 billion awesome minutes per month surfing.

These people interact with over 900 million objects (pages, groups, events, etc.) and more than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, newsstories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared each month.

Wait, there is also a “like” button that you can click underneath every single post to signify that you are pleased with what you see. You can make a comment or totally ignore it.

With this brand, or more specifically, ad series, however, the “like” button has reached a sizable number and has even grown a Fan Page.

As in other fan pages that drum beaters of celebrities purposely put up to jack up membership, Cornetto handlers did it without even lifting a finger. The fans, mostly teens, did it.

Awareness, copy lines verbatim recall, comprehension, humor, overall likability—this campaign created by Lowe and Partners for Cornetto Unilever is most likely your favorite, too.

What can you do with P20? The agency’s “Sarap ng 20 Pesos” TV ad series began in 2008 on affordability and taste platform. The series included “Horror” “Barber” and “Bouncer.”

The latest is “Sweater,” showing a young guy on vacation in Baguio rummaging through an “ukay-ukay” shop for a sweatshirt. As in previous commercials, the ad demonstrates what you can’t do with 20 bucks nowadays but you can with delicious, yummy and flavorful Cornetto.

The good news is, it is not borrowed from an international campaign. In an advertising landscape that keeps on changing, local ad agencies are marginalized because of budget shifts to mother networks and aligned agencies.

“We’re proud of our work for Cornetto and even more so that some of our agency’s work has gone regional,” says Creative Director Abi Aquino whose team has focused on the brand for a couple of years now.

The campaign is a breath of fresh air, a product of the heart like its logo. You can see love sprinkled all over it by a team whose passion is as intense as that of people where the ice cream originated, Naples.

Aquino, whose creative managerial style includes allowing her underlings to fly, believes in collaborative effort. “I believe everyone has an idea worth looking into,” she says with a firm tone.

Aquino and her team squeeze their creative minds to the last drop, regularly churning out a rich number of ideas, and not settling for less. “We make sure that we are ready and have a bounty of options for clients to select from, whether for traditional, new and social media,” she says.

Her equally energetic art director John Pabalan, young and most likely a creative director-material, couldn’t agree more. “We’ve probably conceptualized more than 30 storylines, brainstorming based on consumer insights. The group welcomes ideas from whoever, the more the merrier, anybody who can help make the idea in better shape, he or she is definitely in,” Pabalan says.

“Cornetto first used the slogans “Mag-Cornetto ka na lang” (“Just have a Cornetto instead”) and “Hanggang saan aabot ang 20 pesos mo?” (“How far will your 20 pesos take you?”). Until today, the latter proves just as strong as when we first launched it,” account manager Mel Tomas says.

Before it was marketed in the country, Cornetto enjoyed a successful advertising campaign in Italy using a famous operatic gondolier to sing “O Sole Mio” in many situations and locales throughout Europe.

The campaign ran for 10 years (1980-1990), with its theme recycled back in 2006 and pedestrians, drivers, office workers, even marathon runners in London singing the song. Since then, the ice cream has become one of the most popular ice cream brands in the UK and Ireland.

A cone full of delights, an ice cream that gave birth to a series of highly recalled TV commercials. Most likely, you’ll give it a lot of check marks. Shall we check the “like” button, now?