Thursday, September 22, 2005

Adwatch - No 58

Some commercials are baffling. Some commercials are intensely irritating. To devise one that is both is quite an achievement by the people who live on Planet Creative.
I refer to the Coca Cola™ commercial that features a very short, stout, bald man who swigs from a bottle of Coke on a street corner and then starts not only smiling at strangers but putting his arm round them and hanging off escalators to gurn at them.
In short - and he is exceedingly short with a very large bum - he behaves like a Happy Drunk who has just had six pints of lager and a couple of Bacardi Breezers.

There's only one thing worse than a Happy Drunk and that's a Violent Drunk but I don't wish to be pestered by either when I'm quietly going about my lawful business on the city streets.
But wait. This unpreposessing little barm cake has been drinking nothing stronger than Coke. So what are they putting in the stuff these days? Ecstasy?

The first time I saw it I thought it was a Government commercial about Care in the Community, the message being that most people with mental health problems are perfectly harmless and that if they lunge at you on an escalator you should just smile back.
Then I realised that this commercial is the latest bastard offspring of 'I want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. I want to buy the world a Coke and keep it company'.
Bear with me. I've just been sick over my keyboard.

Was that song Coke or was it Pepsi?
Coke, schcoke; Pepsi, schpepsi: they're both gut-rotting, tooth-decaying bilge water.

Yes, that song was Coke. I've just checked*. They could make it the new national anthem for the free and democratic republic of Iraq. The Sunni would lie down with the Shia before you could say 'It's the Real Thing'.
Better still, they could send that little bald fellow on to the streets of Basra. With any luck someone would rip his grinning head off.

*When I checked the song on Google I found it featured in a Christmas sermon on a Methodist website, a site that had the audacity to blast hymns through my computer's speakers.
Excuse me, I think I'm going to be sick again.

4 Comments:

At 1:03 PM, Blogger portuguesa nova said...

lol!

 
At 2:56 PM, Blogger Willie Lupin said...

Was this ad shown in America too? It looks as though it was made there.

 
At 9:24 AM, Blogger Reluctant Nomad said...

I've not seen it (don't watch that much telly) but it sounds barmy.

The most recent softdrink ad to catch my attention is the one that relaunches Fanta Lite. You know, the one where people go around spitting out yellow liquid because it's the 'old' Fanta lite, the one that has now been superceded by the new, tastier version.

It's put me off Fanta lite forever.

 
At 9:11 AM, Blogger Willie Lupin said...

RN: haven't seen the Fanta ad. It's evidently one of those that tells you that, contrary to what they said at the time, the previous version of their product was crap. One of the many peculiarities of advertising.

 

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