Pak Fook again

A follow-on from yesterday. I just found out that there is another version in the Pak Fook "Beauty" campaign. When we run a campaign with different ad versions, we are often faced with a common problem : one version is stronger than another in terms of creativity and relevance. The more versions we have, the more difficult it is to get at all versions "as good". Ad agencies hate me if I say this but personally I would try to avoid versioning. The fundamental is that if we have a good creative, we should go out all with all our (limited) media money to build frequency and repeated impressions, rather than spreading out our money on a good one plus a mediocre one.

This version from Pak Fook is thought to be weaker. Why ? Analogy between black soy bean and pearl. Pearl is an aged, long-forgotten ingredient for beauty where most people may not be able to associate it with beauty any longer. If this is really the case, the analogy fails and so does the ad.