Wideroe - Snowball

Wideroe - Snowball

Following its successful Grandpa’s Magic Trick commercial (nearly 1.5 million views on YouTube), which was voted as one of the best commercials of 2012, this new ad from Norwegian airline Wideroe is part touching, part thought provoking.

The 55-second spot documents a long-distance relationship in which a woman complains that her boyfriend doesn’t come to visit her often enough. Things seem to be going bad when he says “I thought about visiting you…” The woman seems ready to give up, and indeed hangs up the phone, when her boyfriend offers up a big surprise.

Directed by Marius Holst, who was also behind ‘Grandpa’s Magic Trick’, ‘Snowball’ is a serious attempt to pull at viewers’ heart strings but in the end lacks the effortlessness and natural joy of Holst’s previous work that made the last spot so popular.

The tone of voice of the Snowball video is somewhat depressing and although it sums up what is obviously a complicated relationship in just a few careful brushstrokes – which captures the power of travel in connecting travellers with the ones they love – the video has only generated a few thousand views in a couple of months on YouTube.