AEG Shot This Spot Through a Lasagna Dish

It's a dishwasher ad, naturally

AEG tries to go “Shot on iPhone” one better in a :30 backing its latest dishwasher.

Apple’s famously all about its slick product-demo commercials, with the craft behind each ad repping how well the tech performs.

Below, AEG and director James Hawes tweak that basic idea in an unexpected way. They filmed the entire video through a glass lasagna dish. Just minutes before, the plate—which had been stained with red sauce, ricotta and noodles—completed a cleaning cycle in an AEG N.E.W. Favorit.

“First, we had to find a glass lasagna dish that was flat enough to rig up to the camera and had enough clear surface area to cover the lens,” Matthew Comras, creative director at Publicis London, which developed the campaign, tells Muse. “A lot of dishes have a big logo in the middle. We tried something like 40.”

“Then, we cooked lasagna in it. We wanted to get some crispy bits on the dish to make sure it was a proper test,” he recalls.

After the crew polished off the meal, “The dirty dish went into the AEG dishwasher. It had to be 100 percent clean, which it was. Any mark or spec would have shown up really clear on screen.”

The lasagna-lens provides an extra PR tool for AEG to drum up press for the campaign and its appliances. (I wrote about it based on that gimmick. Well played!) Plus, the clip’s slickly done and stands on its own as an understatedly amusing promo.

Social assets play up the creative challenge. Work drops this month across Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, with more European markets to follow.