PRIVATEVIEW.(6 ads at a glance)(Brief Article)

Suntan fading fast? The "R" word creeping in to conversations? Starting to ask yourself life's really big question: "Have I got anything to enter for the awards yet?"

If that all sounds familiar, so does the latest 2 Smirnoff campaign (remember "If Carlsberg did holidays they'd probably be the best in the world"). I didn't rate this idea first time round and despite some brave attempts at visual wit in the posters the thought is tortuous. Not a patch on Lowe's "looking through the bottle" campaign.

4 Three print ads sponsored by the Flowers & Plants Association are trying to get women to buy their own flowers instead of waiting for their other halves to get round to it. This is a brilliant idea for us blokes and I wish them every success. Presumably the lady in question gets to write her own message too. That's what I call girl power. I can see this approach working for chocolates, weekend breaks and chick flick tickets.

Those little monkeys at Mother have come up 1 with a little monkey to help explain ITV Digital's offer. Monkey is clearly related to two other knitted characters, Harvey and Hibby, from the late lamented Harvey Nichols' campaign, but probably destined to be more famous. You can't help but like him because he is so human (an odd thing to say about a ball of wool with a hand stuck up the middle). Monkey and his noisy friend, Al, show us how to get the most out of ITV Digital in an engaging way. Monkey and the product are the heroes, poor Al doesn't stand a chance.

3 Gap has done some more singing and dancing commercials for its adult denim range. I've spotted Juliette Lewis (Natural Born Killers and Cape Fear) dancing to a Daft Punk track in one of them. Maybe I'm being daft but I can't name the other Americans in the rest of the spots. It doesn't matter, because they're quite watchable.

I know an American who pronounces Worcester sauce "Woister sauce". It was always called 5 Lea & Perrins in our house and my father couldn't get enough of it on his steak. In two new commercials we see how a bottle of the sauce is accidentally knocked into a pan of spaghetti bolognese and on to some cheese on toast. They're classically shot and it's not a bad way to show how a product that's been around since 800BC can be used in a new way. The only time I use it is in a Bloody Mary after a night on a different sauce.

6 Carling has raided Hollywood to do an entertaining Castaway pastiche where a Tom Hanks un-lookalike is washed ashore with a fridge full of lager. One problem, there's no electricity to cool the stuff down. Our castaway cleverly enlists the help of a crab to construct and run a kind of dynamo out of plane wreckage. This generates electricity to cool the fridge. It looks a lot better than the original, is thankfully several thousand times ...