Creative Salon Loves... Dulux and Ogilvy's 'Life Is What You Paint It'

Some advertising characters are remembered, fewer still are loved. The Dulux dog manages to be both.

It has padded and panted its way through British living rooms for so long, and with such quiet assurance, that it feels less like a mascot than a piece of domestic folklore - passed from generation to generation. This is what makes this latest outing from Ogilvy so appealing: the ad does not try to reinvent an old favourite, only remind us why it worked in the first place.

Moreover Dulux has never really sold just paint. It has sold the promise that a room can change the mood of a home, and maybe even the mood of the person living in it. A fresh coat has always carried a bit of emotional charge is the Dulux schtick: part practical fix, part satisfying personal reset.

Ogilvy’s new work gets that. Rather than leaning too hard on heritage for heritage’s sake, it uses the Dulux dog to reconnect the brand with those small but significant life moments when people want their surroundings to say something new about who they are.

The new ad introduces the dog ('Dorothy') as a puppy with a magical knack for shaking Dulux colours from her shaggy coat. At first, that power is more chaos than craft, sending paint flying across her owner’s new home before, over time, she learns to harness it and reveal the transformative power of colour throughout different life stages.

That is why the Dulux dog still matters. For 65 years it has carried something more valuable than mere enduring fame or recognition: affection. It belongs to that small group of British brand icons that people do not just recognise, but feel warmly towards. In a world of brands forever trying to appear newer, louder and more culturally pertinent than the next, there is something refreshing about Dulux simply leaning into what it already owns: familiarity, charm and thoughts of home.

And most of all Creative Salon loves the Dulux dog because it was a distinctive asset before distinctive assets became System1 enforced marketing, errr, dogma.