Watch the full ad here:

Laurence's thoughts:

"Today’s cars look more similar than ever, and much the same can be said of car advertising. So it’s bittersweet that an ad like ‘Cake’ is still remembered so fondly.

Having spent a good few years upending the brand’s previously dismal reputation with the judo manoeuvre of ‘It’s a Skoda. Honest’ - and now entrusted with the launch of the next iteration of the Fabia supermini - ‘Cake’ sprung from a sense that we could finally loosen our grip on the problem.

Instead, we would chase creative fame (because we weren’t going to win on budget alone) and emotional goodwill (because we’d already seen how far this could take us in a supposedly rational category).

Cut to an inconvenient truth. The star turn in our previous work had been given a thoroughly unremarkable facelift. (The product briefing from our client led with a new umbrella holder.)

Ambition intact, an aggregation of similar minor tweaks in the spirit of ‘Every Little Helps’ was the best we could muster as a brief. It was the creative minds that blew the doors off, over tea and - yes - cake at a caff on Great Titchfield Street.

“Full of lovely stuff”. New Fabia: check! Cake: check!

The brand and business success that followed was the fruit of as many wonderful - and enduring - ingredients as the ‘cake car’ itself.

An idea that was leftfield yet simple, original but appropriate.

An execution that oozed the craft and care of human practitioners, both behind the camera and in front of it: take a bow, Royal College of Icing.

A client confident enough in its agency partners to back their insistence that the new car itself should not, in fact, be shown.

‘Cake’ is a commercial that dared to delight and did just that."