Photo: Tadej Golob
These days it will be exactly 70 years since the founding of the Mercator retail company. On this occasion, ArnoldVuga agency has created an ambitious communication campaign that tracks the traces of “the best neighbour’s” presence in everyday life.
It is extremely rare that a retail company can boast with things such as that it is featured in the bestselling detective novel by Tadej Golob – without any product placement! – that it is connected with the creation of music by the popular Dan D band, that a public transport bus station is named after it in a country’s capital…
“It seems as if Mercator is embedded so deep under our skin that we accept it as a generic term for a store. I grew up alongside it,” writer Tadej Golob says in the behind the scenes documentary.
In the seventy seconds of the TV ad directed by Saša Podgoršek, we see exactly that: how Mercator’s bag appears in Lenin’s Park, a book by Tadej Golob, and how Dan D creates music at Plac. We also see what one of the architects of Maxi, eighty-seven-year-old Anton Pibernik, and author of future uniforms of Maxi staff, costume designer Alan Hranitelj, had to say about achieving timeless success.
Even the voice in the spot will be familiar to viewers and listeners from the very beginning, as it is the voice of actress Milena Zupančić.
On the occasion of the seventieth birthday, Mercator highlights the connection between its employees and their local environment, the neighbourhoods in which they strive to be the best neighbour.
But, as Dan D’s singer Tokac says: “My Mercator, ten feet from home, works all week until nine o’clock, even on Sundays. It is truly my best neighbour, because I can buy bread and cheese exactly when I need them.”
