Why are a good few adverts featuring puppets and computer generated images? Only a few products eg shampoo, mascara, skin creams continue to employ humans.

[dance2trance]

Is it because advertisers need not pay royalty fees to non humans or is it that they hate us?

[emmie]

i hope they don't hate us, but perhaps it is cheaper in the long term, advertising is a costly business.

[Old_Geezer]

You probably pay more attention to, and recall the cartoon more. Ultimately the fee for an actor is much less important to than the effectiveness of the ad.

[DaisyNonna]

Usually recall the cartoon but with no idea what is being advertised.

[cazzz1975]

most of the shampoo, mascara, skin creams and make up adverts are heavily computer edited and enhanced so technically they are barely human..

[DaisyNonna]

How many people actually buy what is advertised?

[Nodger]

I can't believe they have replaced the real Andrex puppies with AWFUL CGI ones. That seems a mad marketing decision.

Let's hope the Dulux dog is safe

[EcclesCake]

CGI is easy to modify at relatively little cost. You can keep updating and modifying your advert and tune to current events. If you use real actors it is much harder to do as they age, hair changes, might not be available etc.

[boxtops]

The Dulux advert is grotesque now - a puppy is a puppy, these horrid new things are anthropomorphosed. Big mistake.

[Nodger]

That may be true for actors, EcclesCake, but puppies?

I think there should be a campaign to bring them back in the flesh.

[tonymclark]

A lot of actor fees are buy-outs, they get one fee and that's it. Only the big name stars can command a fee each time the ad is shown. The same goes for voice-overs - a well known name with a recognisable voice will get more than a jobbing voice-over actor.

I would say the production costs of animated commercials is far more than live-action (though it depends on the scale of live-action filming). For one thing it takes longer to make an animated ad. But most of the cost of the campaign goes on the ideas and the advertising space itself, the production costs are only a part of it.

Also, a lot of the animated and puppeteered adverts still use a live-action setting that has to be filmed, and they still employ actors to provide the voice of the animated character (think of the Tetley Tea Folk and Compare the Market ads).

[woofgang]

the problem with andrex puppies is the number that you need to film them as even one dog, therefore the number that need to be bred to find enough identical ones and what happens to the discards and the pups that are used after the filming....There were huge problems after the live version of 101 Dalmations was filmed with the excess of pups that it created. CGI might not be so cute but its a whole lot more humane!