Egg.com, a UK credit card company now owned by CitiGroup, is axing its famous guinea pig ads it started running in 2005 (TV and print). If you didn’t already know, this was a great campaign, with kooky music, people dressed up in funny outfits and superimposed guinea pig heads.

Both creative and addicting, the idea was:
“Egg Money is so revolutionary we had to test it on guinea pigs and our TV commercials show you the outcome.”

Glassworks produced the videos, which can be seen on their site, but also this dude has the collected videos and magazine spreads available for download. Go on - you know you want to. These ads worked because people have an inherent distrust of actors on TV, but animals are innocent, right? And left in their ‘natural habitat’, the Egg card solved all their problems. Plus, the art direction was amazing - I mean not many people realize that guinea pigs don’t really have shoulders, but these guys were convincing. That can be attributed to this explanation given on Egg’s site:

The advert was filmed using actors wearing specially constructed guinea pig body suits with custom-made clothes. They were trained and choreographed by an expert in animal movement, to give them the correct body articulation associated with guinea pigs. The heads of real guinea pigs were filmed later, to match with the movements of the actors; these were then combined in post-production with the bodies.

What’s next for Egg? A dolphin named Raoul, jumping through a hoop to draw attention to Egg Card’s zero per cent offer with the strapline ‘You know where you are with Egg’.

I dunno. It doesn’t do anything for me. Reminds me of those old ‘Cadbury Bunny Audition’ commercials. There’s just no replacement that makes sense