Skoda
The Baking Of
Fallon
‘180kg of orange sugar paste. 25kg of dried apricot. 180 fresh eggs. 42kg of chocolate fudge … ’ Think of an advert that this list of ingredients could apply to, and it can only be one: the delicious Skoda Baking Of spot, by Fallon ad agency in London in 2007, which saw a team of chefs and home economists make a replica Skoda Fabia car entirely out of cake.
01 The Skoda Baking Of commercial saw a team of chefs and home economists create a Skoda Fabia car entirely from cake. The bakers all appeared in the ad, and are shown here posing alongside their creation in the final image of the spot.
Fallon devised the unusual idea in response to a brief to celebrate the launch of the latest version of the Fabia. Unusually, there was no specific gimmick in the new car to hang the advertising around – no ‘0 to 60 in seven seconds’, or ‘the most spacious vehicle in its class’ – and instead Skoda had updated it in a lot of small, if charming, ways. Rather than fight against this potential problem, the creative team decided to run with it, basing the ad around the fact that the car was ‘full of lovely stuff’. The idea to use cake – because it too is full of lovely things – followed naturally.
There was a precedent for the spot in an earlier commercial for the Skoda Roomster that was also made by Fallon. This ad was set in the Skoda factory, but rather than the usual industrial soundtrack found in such a setting, the machines giggled and yelped, as if to articulate the happiness of the car plant. It ended with the tag ‘Manufacturer of happy drivers’.
Despite the quirkiness that this brought to the brand, the client still needed significant persuasion from Fallon to turn their beloved Fabia into a cake. ‘It was like taking medicine – “do I have to?”,’ says the agency’s chairman at the time, Laurence Green, of the client response. ‘Because any car organization expects at least the real car to be shown at some point in the commercial, and ideally shown driving speedily around bends in France and Italy – that’s the expectation.’
Fallon suggested some compromises in order to sell the idea through, including an end shot that would see the cake car turn into the real one. Happily, this image didn’t make the final cut. ‘We shot it,’ says Richard Flintham, executive creative director on the project. ‘We had to go through the whole thing just to be seen to be responsible. Everyone was saying, “it would be madness to do this”, and I suppose it’s only because the cake car looked so good that we could.
If it had looked a bit wonky, and the sponge had subsided, we would have had to show the other one. But we had amazing, amazing modelmakers.’
02-03 Production photographs from the set of the commercial. Hundreds of biscuits and cakes were created for use in the ad.
‘Any car organization expects at least the real car to be shown at some point in the commercial, and ideally shown driving speedily around bends in France and Italy – that’s the expectation.’
The agency had established a reputation for making stunning ads that were all created for real, rather than using CGI or special effects. The team wanted to achieve the same surprise and awe with the Skoda ad, to create a real cake car, rather than try to fool the viewer with models. Chris Palmer was chosen to direct, in part because he felt the same way – ‘I wanted to do it for real,’ he says, ‘which I later heard was a different approach to other treatments.’
There was also a fashion at the time for creating ‘making-of’ films for ads, a tendency that continues in the industry even now. This prompted the idea to make the ad in a documentary style, so the finished piece was a making-of in itself (this also gave birth to the spot’s name, The Baking Of). ‘There were loads of different script variants for Baking Of,’ says Flintham. ‘It was really sold as, we’re going to make a Fabia out of cake, because cake makes you happy, and cakes are full of lovely stuff. But in the end you work through it with the director, and it ends up being the building of a cake.’
Palmer had demonstrated his skill for creating charming documentary-style advertising in spots for adidas – where David Beckham and Jonny Wilkinson were shown sharing sporting tips – and for Carlsberg, where a group of ex-England football stars were brought together to create ‘the best pub team in the world’. For the Skoda ad, Palmer and Fallon hired a crack team of chefs and home economists to make the cake car and star in the ad, including a few who also had some acting experience, who ‘could make something happen if it got a bit dull’, says Flintham.
Perhaps inevitably, the shoot was not without its problems. ‘We got through a few bakers,’ remembers Palmer. ‘I think it was quite tough. I remember a lot of furrowed brows and accusing eyes looking in my direction.… We did loads of tests. Some cakes turned out really badly. I remember a batch that looked like they were badly wounded. Eventually we figured out that Madeira cake was the best base. The cheapest, nastiest ingredients used in mass-market cakes created the most solid brick.’
On set, Flintham was anxious that none of the ‘real moments’ of the shoot were missed. ‘Chris was great,’ he says. ‘I was angsty about it – watching people in a prep room doing all this amazing stuff and saying “my God, you’ve got to be shooting that, it’s so exciting.” But he found a really nice balance I think. He found a lovely middle ground between authenticity and performance. It was nice that he delivered something where you could see his hand in it, slightly more than we set out to do.’
Part of the solution to keeping Flintham calm was to encourage him to contribute to the making of the car cake. ‘I had an idea that we could make a headlight out of Foxes Glacier Mints,’ he says. ‘So they gave me a glue gun and said “you’ll never be able to do that”. Which was a masterstroke really – it got me out of the way, sitting there doing this headlight.’
Such inventiveness in the cake’s design adds enormously to the final ad’s charm, which, alongside the Glacier Mint headlights, includes panels made from Rice Krispies, a Battenberg engine block, liquorice fan belts and jelly tail-lights. Even the oil that is shown being poured into the car is golden syrup. These touches were at times a headache for the team of chefs, however. ‘The toughest problem to crack was probably creating a realistic-looking windscreen for the pack shot,’ says Palmer. ‘Initially the concept of doing it for real horrified the technical experts. At times I felt like the Antichrist, but we were all mates again in the end.’
04-13 The ad was shot as if it was a fly-on-the-wall documentary recording the baking of the giant cake. In fact, it was a mixture of real scenes with performance: some of the chefs also had acting experience. But the ad’s charm lies in its authentic feel, and a real cake car was built. Production images from the set shown here document the design of various details of the car, including the speed dials and battery.
‘We did loads of tests. Some cakes turned out really badly. I remember a batch that looked like they were badly wounded.’
14-16 Bricks of Madeira cake were used to create the car’s basic form. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turned out that the cheapest ingredients made the most solid and durable blocks of cake.
17-21 Part of the delight of the Skoda ad lies in its attention to detail. Instead of simply creating the external shell of the car, the team sculpted all its internal machinery too. Shown here is the cake engine, alongside other production photographs taken during the shoot.
The shoot took place over four days and resulted in a spectacular, if inedible (due to being under the heat of the studio lights) cake car. All that was left to resolve was the music. As their dream soundtrack, the team had chosen Julie Andrews singing My Favourite Things from The Sound of Music, a song that fitted perfectly with the clean-cut, feel-good tone of the spot. But Andrews had never consented to her voice being used in an ad before. ‘The music was the scariest bit,’ says Flintham. ‘Half an hour before play out we had to wait for Julie Andrews to give her consent, otherwise we had [BBC talent show winner] Connie Fisher. Again good, but when you’ve just built a bloody Foxes Glacier Mint headlight, you want Julie Andrews to go with it.’ In the end, Andrews acquiesced. ‘She liked it because of how well Chris had done it, I think,’ says Flintham.
Despite the joy of this success, the song did have an impact on the film’s length, as Palmer remembers. ‘We had so much more footage and a really good longer cut,’ he says, ‘but the track only really worked for 60 seconds. For some reason, when Julie repeated a verse your inclination was to kick the TV in.’
22-24 The director, Chris Palmer (shown bottom left in fig. 24) was the one who insisted on making the cake car for real. His resolve tested the skills of the bakers and technical experts on set, but they produced an impeccable model of the Fabia by the end.
‘We had so much more footage and a really good longer cut, but the track only really worked for 60 seconds. For some reason, when Julie repeated a verse your inclination was to kick the TV in.’
25-30 Stills from the finished commercial, which was set to a soundtrack of Julie Andrews singing My Favourite Things. It was the first time ever that she had consented to her voice being used in a commercial.