If this ad doesn't give you Chivas…

This ad doesn't have a headline. Unless you count 'To Dad' featured in the illustration - which is otherwise just a somewhat banal product shot. It flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Well the conventions of copy-based story telling anyway. I suppose that's one of the things that makes the ad intriguing and attention grabbing  - that and the fact that it ran in the week preceding Father's Day in the English sunday colour supplements and many of the readers would have had the nagging thought "I really must do something about a Father's Day gift." in the back of their minds.

The eloquently written copy tugs ever so gently at the heart strings. Its author, the renowned English creative David Abbott says he penned it as if it was a not to his own father. It wasn't the only time he featured in the first person in an ad for his clients - he also showed himself lying prone beneath a Volvo, hanging from a crane above him (If the welding isn't strong enough the car will fall on the writer). What an understated showman he was. 

Every paragraph begins with the word 'Because…', probably because the gift of a bottle of Chivas is a little lavish (not in absolute terms, but the positioning of the blended whiskey was that it was better than it is in truth) - and so it needed a little justification. It also mirrors the most popular poem in the English poetic repertoire by Rudyard Kipling - though this time from father to son…If.  That is a sentimental cultural connection I am sure wasn't lost on the readers of The Times or Guardian.

It is a masterful ad - never once mentioning the brand by name. Never once espousing its virtues; no 'lovingly blended  by 80 year old Scottish virgins…'. No reason or logic. And yet there they are: 50 good reasons to bestow Chivas Regal on your father - who, as a Times reader himself, will wonder why you foisted scorched almonds from the gas station on him yet again.