The pig is loose in the yard

As the main characters in 11 commercials, Barry and Hans have been able to sneak into the hearts of TV viewers for over a year. The good-natured Bernese mountain dog with the sharp wit and the lively goose with the cackling simplicity are the likeable ambassadors for Swiss fruit and vegetables. The advertising agency Unikat invented the animal comedy duo in the style of Laurel and Hardy. Manifesto Films brought the characters to life. The idea of letting other inhabitants of a farm have their say instead of fruit and vegetable growers for a new communication campaign was not entirely uncontroversial at first, but then found a majority in the two associations of Swiss vegetable producers and the fruit association. For the first time, they have joined forces with the same agency and the same camera for this campaign.

Large fan group wanted continuation

Since then, the two associations have received "almost daily requests for more stories from Barry and Hans", says "animal father" and CD Daniel Meier at Unikat. Many would have liked a full-length feature film, "but that would have swallowed up a budget of millions due to the elaborate animal animations", calculates director Reto Salimbeni at Manifesto. He therefore had the brilliant idea of producing a radio play when setting the commercials to music. "There aren't too many clients who are so boldly prepared to break new ground when it comes to communication," says Daniel Meier, describing the happy ending. After just a few meetings, they had the go-ahead from the associations.

New story and new characters

As the father of two children, Daniel Meier, who also wrote the stories and dialog for the TV commercials, had the ideal test audience right at home to write five more stories in a long version of 76 minutes in total. In these "modern fairy tales for today's kids", Barry and Hans are joined by other farm animals for action, humor and emotion. Sony Music came on board in the winter and spontaneously agreed to market the radio play as a CD. Manifesto and Salimbeni then produced the episodes in Roman Camenzind's Hit-Mill, with popular voices from the Swiss entertainment industry such as Dodo Hug, Endo Anakonda, Hans Ruchti, Fabienne Hadorn and Claudio Zuccolini providing the animal dialog. Hit producer Roman Camenzind and Fred Hermann contributed over 20 minutes of specially composed music. The whole creation was then "cinematically mixed like a feature film" and should therefore also stand out in terms of quality from the usually much cheaper children's productions.

For the creators, their advertising figures have thus been "taken out of the advertising vessel and into the culture". You could also say that people are happy to spend money to buy advertising. As well as conveying the positive messages about Swiss fruit and vegetables, a few key messages from the commercials have of course been incorporated 1:1 into the audio sequences. "Each story has a short sequence that actually took place in the TV commercials," says Daniel Meier, playing with the Hitchcock gag that can also be found briefly in all his films. However, the "surreptitious advertising" in the radio play is never forced on the audience's eyes or ears. The CD with Barry and his pals is distributed by Sony and marketed prominently by Coop, Mediamarkt and Ex Libris. It will be interesting to see whether the animal stories will one day become classics of modern fairy tales.
Andreas Panzeri