Gap borrows awkward

Gap’s new global agency, Wieden + Kennedy, launched Dress Normal in August, with four black and white ads directed by David Fincher.

Gap’s global chief marketing officer, Seth Farbman, explained (?), “What I wanted, because this is Gap, was positive anxiety. When you’re dressing normal, you’re really your truest and most confident and authentic self.”

People didn’t really get the ads either. Nor their tagline, Dress like No One’s Watching.

The pre-Christmas campaign that went to air on November 3 is much more “normal’. Everyone’s authentic, awkward, Christmas normal.

Sofia Coppola captures awkwardly normal remarkably well. The tagline in each of the four new ads, reminds people, “You don’t have to get them to give them Gap.” Makes you feel that Gap ‘gets you’ doesn’t it?!

The ads fit into Gap’s Dress Normal campaign, because the campaign strategy is inherently a good one. The 45 year old brand is beginning to sneak back in with the in crowd after becoming the brand that sells dowdy to the middle classes. Dress Normal was how Gap intended to make conventional clothes cool.

Each film in the Christmas campaign is an awkward Christmas moment underlined by an apt classic song.

Crooner is backed by Johnnie Ray’s Cry.