The Olympic ashes are still warm and the sponsor companies are already throwing their money towards the World Cup, which starts in June. This ad from Pepsi was just released:
I really don’t know what to think. First of all, this ad features two of my very favorite players: Thierry “my face is so smooth because I used to shill for Gillette until they replaced me with Derek Jeter” Henry, and little Leo “no snarky nickname for me because I’m actually totally awesome” Messi. But I can’t say that the ad paints them or any of the players in a particularly cool light. Apparently these extremely talented soccer players are even less coordinated than a normal person. Kaká is tripped by a cheeky meerkat. Messi gets lost in some tallish grass after hitting his head on a tree branch.
And the acting, my god, the “acting.” Out of that group of players, did they really give the dialogue to the ones who spoke English the best? I sure hope not. One of the players in the commercial is from England, no lines for him? He must be completely unintelligible to US audiences.
The people-as-moving-field idea was pretty clever, I just feel like it dragged on for too long. And the ending wasn’t great, are we supposed to believe that the player kicked the ball high enough for all of the people to have time to rotate the field 180 degrees? It would have been better if they just moved to close up the goal or something like that.
And let’s face it, we’re talking about Pepsi here, not Coke. I feel like if this was a Coke commercial, the kid at the beginning would have just given the players a Coke. But no, they have to play for it, and then once the players lose due to cheating on a scale the players aren’t used to (even Henry), they still have to trade their shirts to finally get that Pepsi. Actually, having just watched that old Coke ad, it’s hard to imagine that Pepsi wasn’t turning that old Coke ad on it’s head intentionally, what with the jersey at the end. I just don’t think it was a great idea.
Let’s contrast this new Pepsi ad with my favorite ad from the last World Cup, from Adidas:
They have a similar overall theme of soccer superstars hanging out with ordinary people, but that’s about where the similarities end. This ad has better special effects, better “acting” from the players, and more players (the addition of some of the old footage is pretty genius). Plus it reminds me of that classic Simpsons episode, where Ralph and Bart are picking teams for a pickup baseball game and all these MLB stars wander by each time it’s Ralph’s turn to pick. Also, this ad seems to address the reality that the only sort of scenario in which you would find a bunch of star players in the same place that’s not on the field would be in someone’s imagination.
I’m also excited to see what Nike is going to come up with for the World Cup, their Joga Bonito (“Play Beautifully” in Portuguese) campaign four years ago was pretty great.
Speaking of Nike, they just premiered the new jerseys for a bunch of the national teams in advance of the World Cup. I’ll try to write a post about that in the next couple days.
2 Comments
Crozz, are you breaking away from a strictly punctuation format? How’s that feel? This is your second non-punctuation article. I’m all for it. So long as we don’t end up with competing Lost articles. =)
I’m coming down with a case of World Cup fever this week. I think I’ve got another two more soccer posts in me still for this week. I’ll try to keep it punctuation focused, but sometimes I get bored waiting a week for something interesting to write about that’s punctuation related.