Dyson's in-house team and director Will Dohrn take the CameraJet apart on screen. No smiling white teeth, no story, just the engineering that has to justify the price.
Dyson has made an advert for a toothbrush that contains no shots of anybody smiling. The film for the CameraJet went up on the brand’s own channel on 1 September, made by Dyson’s in-house creative team with the production company Love Song, and it is a product demonstration that behaves like a title sequence.
The product is an electric toothbrush with a camera in the head. Dyson describes it as “the only toothbrush with a camera to find the gaps and precision-floss, removing plaque while you brush”, and James Dyson unveiled it on stage in Paris. The film takes the thing apart rather than showing it in use: exploded components, design sketches, a chalkboard, dental X-rays and a run of very close shots of brushing and flossing.
Will Dohrn directed. Creative Review, which covered the launch, credits Pablo Gonzalez De La Pena Bermejo as global executive creative director with Paul Sethi and Fred Rodwell as heads of creative, and puts the price at more than £400. That number is the brief. At four hundred pounds the advertising cannot simply assert that the product is good, it has to show the engineering that justifies the number.
The demonstration is the oldest format in advertising and the hardest to make watchable, which is why the good ones get remembered as something else. Honda “Cog” is a two minute parts list. Sony “Balls” is a colour chart. Both worked because the demonstration was hidden inside a spectacle, and the viewer took the engineering claim on trust because they had enjoyed the two minutes.
Dyson does the opposite, and has done since the bagless vacuum films: the demonstration is the spectacle, with no story wrapped around it. That only works for a brand whose entire proposition is that the object is cleverer than the alternatives, and it is one of the few cases where an in-house team is an advantage rather than a compromise. Nobody outside the building knows the product that well.
The open question is whether a camera in a toothbrush is a feature anybody wanted. The film is convincing on how hard the thing was to make, and quiet on why you would want it, which is the risk that comes with letting engineers set the agenda.
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