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forget product placement…

Posted on July 21, 2008 by Becky Green (was McMichael)

…why not just suggest your client produces a musical about its product and puts it on at Edinburgh festy, getting the audience to pay £11 a pop to watch what is essentially an ad. Oh, and then you sit back and watch the pretty impressive PR about the project roll out too….

….the product? Pot Noodle!

Here it is covered by Mark Sweney in today’s Media Guardian…

Now it’s Pot Noodle: The Musical

The world of Pot Noodle, a brand that made a virtue of the catch phrase “Slag of all snacks”, is to be turned into a musical comedy at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Pot Noodle’s ad agency Mother London has been developing a stage production – Pot Noodle: The Musical – based on some of the creative concepts used in advertising the snack in recent years and aims to dish up a “smorgasbord of comedy”.

The show is set in the “idyllic all-singing, all-dancing Pot Noodle factory”, where workers “pluck Pot Noodles fresh from trees, bottle feed and show them a whole heap of tender loving care”.

It follows the story of the hero Steve, who tries to woo Sandie and overthrow the “bloated overlord” of the Pot Noodle factory, Allan Little, who has killed his brother in a bid to siphon off money to “spend on fast cars and loose women of virtue”.

Little has a “beastly asthma suffering henchman” called Flick Ferdinando.

The show, which will run at the Assembly in Edinburgh from July 31 to August 25, has drawn creatively on the songs and themes that have run through Mother’s recent un-PC Pot Noodle TV campaigns.

In the musical Digger, who has just fled from his wedding, and the hero Steve walk down the street singing the “Pact song” from the Pot Noodle ad about never putting a woman before mates.

“We can stay up late till dawn, watching classic vintage porn,” the duo sing. “We can scratch our balls with pride, our man breasts don’t need to hide.”

The idea of a benevolent Pot Noodle world first appeared with a TV campaign featuring a fictitious Welsh town of noodle miners.

And the irreverent songs that will feature in the Fringe production have come from the recent “Pot Noodle says” ad campaign.

The campaign also featured two crooners spoofing Meatloaf’s Bat out of Hell and a 1980s power ballad with lines praying for women to be “easy, simple and hassle-free” like the snack.

The film, entitled Somers Town, is named after an area near King’s Cross in north London and tells of the friendship between two teenagers, one of whom is the son of an immigrant working on the new Eurostar terminal.

Mother is no stranger to extending brands beyond traditional TV advertising. Earlier this year the agency produced a feature film funded by Eurostar with Shane Meadows, the award-winning director of This Is England, which won top prize at the Edinburgh Film Festival.