Orange Man (advertisement)

Orange Man

Agency	HHCL
Client	Britvic
Language	English
Running time	40 seconds 30 seconds (edited version)
Product	Tango Orange
Release date(s)	1992
Starring	Peter Geeves Ray Wilkins Hugh Dennis Gil Scott-Heron
Country	United Kingdom
Preceded by	Cleaning Windows
Followed by	Oranges!

Orange Man is a British television advertisement for the soft drink Tango. It was produced by HHCL, a longtime collaborator of Tango who would go on to create many of their advertisements.

The first in their "You Know When You've Been Tango'd" campaign, it was made in 1991 and aired on television in 1992. It features an orange man slapping a Tango drinker across the cheeks, this sequence representing a wacky metaphor for tasting Tango. The advert gained quick controversy after reports of injuries when children began copying the events of the advertisement in school playgrounds, and was subsequently banned, with two other versions of the advert with different events replacing it.

Despite the controversy, it contributed to a boost of sales by more than a third, and has gained acclaim in later years, even featuring and ranking highly in several lists, of the greatest adverts ever made.

Plot

The advertisement starts with three young men standing outside a fruit shop. One of them is drinking a can of Tango. The voice-over of "commentators" Ralph and Tony (reportedly voiced by Hugh Dennis and Ray Wilkins) appear. Ralph says "oh, I think we could use a video replay here" and the footage of the man drinking the Tango is "rewound" (with the effect of a tape recorded being rewound on screen) to before he drinks the Tango, for a "replay". Then, a man completely painted orange comes onto the scene, who runs around the men and then taps the man with the Tango can on the back.

The man turns around, then the orange man slaps him across the cheeks, and then runs off. Ralph and Tony become excited and rewind the clip again to the same position, this time showing the orange man come out from behind a post box and shows the same events with Tony providing commentary. The advertisement ends with the man looking at his Tango can in question, followed by the imagery of the Tango can on top of the orange man's head, with the slogan "You Know When You've Been Tango'd" written on it.

A deep male voice (Gil-Scott Heron) says the slogan at the same time.

Conception and production

The advert was created by Trevor Robinson, Al Young and Steve Henry, and produced by HHCL.

As the co-creator of the advertisement, Trevor Robinson, said in 2000, he said the advertisement was "meant to be taking the mickey out of other ads that were on the television at the time", comparing it to coffee advertisements where "they have a drink and go "oh, whoopy" and flowers bloom", and they decided to "express this in an really OTT fashion".

The plot of the advertisement originally involved the orange man punching the other man in the mouth, as they were trying to make the advertisement as "stupid" and slapstick as possible, then they changed the idea to the orange man kicking the other man up the buttocks, but both ideas were deemed too aggressive, so the final idea of the a "Morecambe and Wise-esque little tap on the cheeks" was used.

People that were intended for the role of the man being slapped were passed over as they did not like the idea of being slapped. Geeves himself was scared of hitting the finally chosen man too hard, though the man did not mind, telling him a hard hit would "make it look real".

Peter Geeves, the man who portrayed the orange man in the advert, recalled in 2006 "I was asked to first of all run around, then run around and scream, then run around screaming topless, it was at that point I thought "aye-aye, this isn't the normal run of the mill advert". The orange paint on him was orange grease paint fixed with hairspray, which took several weeks afterwards to remove."

Co creator of the advertisement, Al Young, said "the guy we used [Geeves] was a like a Shakespearean actor, he was the one who made [the creators] laugh the most" from actors considered for the role, and that it was the way he ran "was surreal". Robinson also praised the role of Geeves' co-star who gets slapped, saying he was a "really good actor, and he was just the best at reacting to being hit, he never made a big deal out of it," calling his performance "cool and dopey."

Controversy

The advertisement sparked much controversy after it was discovered children had copied the events of the advertisement in playgrounds and injured themselves.

Rupert Howell, a Tango advertisement executive, later said in 2000 "It sparked a playground craze" and "people used to go round sort of slapping each other and saying "You've Been Tango'd", and it was all very entertaining and great fun; There were no problems until we got a phone call once from a surgeon who said "look, I'm not the complaining type but I thought you'd like to know that I did an operation on a child this morning with a damaged ear drum, and I was wheeling him in to the operating table, and said to him "what happened to you then?" and replied "I got Tango'd."" He pulled the advertisement from television that afternoon.

It was replaced by a similar version of the advertisement, showing the orange man instead put his hand on the other man's mouth and kiss it, and another where the other man simply ran off as the orange man approached him. The former version was noted by Howell to be "just as good", but Phillip Schofield comically noted in a later commentary that "happy kissing never really caught on." These later versions were also changed to incorporate the recently redesigned Tango Orange can.

Legacy

Despite the controversy, in 2000, the advertisement was voted the 3rd best television advertisement ever, in an poll conducted by Channel 4 and The Sunday Times; the former aired the final top 100 list on television as part of their 100 Greatest series on 29 April 2000. Similarly, an ITV list listing the top 20 adverts ever, entitled "ITV's Best Ads Ever 2", was aired on ITV1 in 2006 which saw the advertisement peak at number 5.

The Guardian referred to Tango as the "original gangster of viral marketing" in 2013, saying that Orange Man "was all it took to engage viewers", and that no "Tango crusade since has managed to recapture that lightning in a 500ml bottle." Marketing Society's website The Library states that Orange Man is the reason why Tango is included in their list of the "golden brands of 1992".

In December 2001, The Telegraph noted that following the airing of the advertisement, sales of the drink rose by more than a third, noting that it "eclipsed" the brand's better-known competitors. Furthermore, Campaign Live noted that "no commercial better symbolized the creative iconaclism of Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury during the early 90s" than Orange Man, and presenter Jenni Falconer said the advert was "brilliant, and everybody loved it and everyone thought it was great."

The advertisement is also credited by Curveball Media for pioneering what would later become known as guerilla advertising, with Tim Delaney of Legas Delaney saying "the whole point was that this radical, strong, full-of-attitude campaign worked – it shifted cans of fizzy pop in a way that got Britvic’s rivals panicking. It also showed what potential there was in thinking of completely fresh ideas. And better than that – it became part of our culture." The drink's later advertisement Pipes was also banned, but not because children had injured themselves, but because there were fears that children were going to injure themselves

Other banned advertisements of the drink included more You Know When You've Been Tango'd adverts and a 2000 "Tango Megaphone" advertisement, the latter also being having a replacement advert produced, although this was not an altered version of the original, but a short advertisement satirising the ban.

The advertisement was parodied in a sketch from a 1992 episode of The Real McCoy which also parodies the assault of Rodney King, with the slogan being "You Know When You Have Been L.A.P.D'd". Tango themselves later parodied the slap in a 1997 advertisement, Vote Orange Tango, which was a parody of a party political broadcast, seeing a mock politician criticising the flavours of the drink that were not Orange, with a man painted orange later slapping the politician's cheeks several times with an orange fish as part of the politician's parade to celebrate the Orange flavour.

In August 2006, Tango's main rival drink, Fanta, aired an advertisement with similarly saw a man being slapped, however unlike Orange Man it escaped being banned.

See also

• Tango (drink)
• Pipes (advertisement)
• St George (advertisement)
• Tango Mini (Austin)