How LG Made a Refrigerator Ad Out of a Vegetable Orchestra

An unusual way to talk about freshness

I tend to remember LG appliances for what they do.

The ads are harder to recall. A list of specifications can tell me why a refrigerator might be worth buying, but it seldom gives me an image I carry away.

Then I saw an LG campaign built around a very different kind of demonstration.

The 2017 campaign featured an LG refrigerator with an Inverter Linear Compressor and an unlikely set of demonstrators: the London Vegetable Orchestra.

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The instruments have to be made before they can be played

The London Vegetable Orchestra has a premise that sounds like a joke until you hear the instruments.

Its musicians make instruments from vegetables such as carrots and courgettes and use them to play recognizable music. The London ensemble that appears in the campaign is separate from the Vegetable Orchestra founded in Vienna in 1998.

The material changes quickly. A vegetable can dry out or soften, changing how well it holds a shape and how it sounds. If you are making an instrument for a performance, the condition of the produce matters before a note is played.

For a vegetable orchestra, freshness is part of how an instrument works. That gives the refrigerator a reason to be in the room.

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Why the refrigerator stays in the background

The refrigerator spends much of the advertisement in a supporting role.

The camera follows the musicians as they choose vegetables, trim and carve them, and find a note that will hold. We see the work it takes to make a short performance possible.

That is enough to put a question in the viewer’s mind. What condition do the vegetables need to be in for any of this to work?

LG lets the work of the musicians show where storage comes into it.

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What the performance demonstrates

LG’s campaign described the performance as using produce that had been kept for a week in one of its refrigerators. The music gives the claim a concrete endpoint: by the time the vegetables reach the players, can they still be turned into instruments?

A scene can make a technical claim easy to picture. Here the musicians do that by putting the produce to an unusually demanding use.

It is easy to remember the sound of a carved vegetable once you have watched someone play it. From there, it is also easy to understand the inference the campaign wants a viewer to make.

If the vegetables can still become instruments, I can picture bringing them out of the refrigerator to cook dinner.

That is the advertising idea. The performance gives the viewer a way to picture freshness in use. It is still a demonstration staged for a campaign, rather than an independent comparison of refrigerators.

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Why these musicians fit the campaign

The London group gave LG a way to begin with a question instead of a product shot.

You may never have heard of the orchestra. The work is immediately recognizable once you see how a note is made, and the premise depends on the material in a way that fits the message about refrigeration.

The viewer has a reason to ask why these musicians are in a refrigerator ad. By the time there is an answer, the viewer has already spent some time thinking about how a vegetable can change in storage.

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What I remember after the ad is over

LG lets the musicians do most of the talking. That leaves the product with one clear job in the story.

What lingers afterward is the performance.

When I think of the refrigerator later, I can still picture the players trying a note on a piece of produce. The two images have stayed together.

For an advertisement about something as ordinary as keeping food fresh, that is a fair measure of what it achieved.

For LG, the campaign offers a way to tell a product story through the people who need it for something specific. I remember their problem and what happened when they sat down to play.