I title this with a number as if I’ll remember to keep it going as time passes. Commercials are relatively a nuisance to begin with, and when I have the misfortune of watching television that isn’t DVR’d, I’m at the mercy of having to sit through them. But every now and then I’ll see a commercial that is just bad, and stands out as bad amongst all the other bad advertising that exists. Commercials that make my contort my face and wonder “what the fuck was that?” Commercials that I’ll deem as stupid for a variety of different reasons, or multiple/all of the above.
But since lately with the inception of a Facebook account, I’m having a tedious time coming up with things to brog about; at least with commercials, there’s an endless well in which stupid content might trigger the urge to slap some words down onto the interwebs. And here we stand.
Does any company truly fail at marketing more than Pepsi? Serious question. The company spends an egregious amount of money to market, but in the end, so little of their marketing actually is good marketing. At first it was the overblown, overly-winded explanation of how the current Pepsi logo came to with inspiration from The Golden Ratio, Michaelangelo’s David, the Mona Lisa, and all sorts of other trite, convoluted explanations that are more laughable than memorable.
But commercials like this have me wonder what the fuck Pepsi is thinking sometimes.
The setting: some beach in some Euro-trash country. Three guys, and unless you’ve read an issue of Sports Illustrated during a World Cup, wouldn’t know are actually three very marquee soccer players outside of the United States, approach a seemingly endless sea of young, attractive partiers, encircling some deejay who’s waving his arms around a gigantic switchboard, pretending like he’s doing something other than playing convoluted musical orgy from his iPod.
Suddenly, they spot the only person in this entire crowd of thousands, actually up on someone else’s shoulders so they can get a better view. Of what, I have no idea, because it’s not like it’s a concert or a stage show, all these people are crowding around a fucking deejay. But regardless, this girl on the shoulders of a person isn’t looking at anything, because one, there’s nothing to actually be looking at, and two, she’s in the process of drinking a Pepsi. Seeing a girl drink a Pepsi suddenly makes these soccer players feel like they need to be drinking Pepsi, and one of them points out a Pepsi machine that they can apparently see clear as day 200 yards or so away.
In order to get from point A to point B, the soccer players don’t mosh their way through the thick crowd, they essentially climb on top of standing people, and miraculously begin sprinting towards the Pepsi machine as seamlessly as if they were walking on a flat surface. Naturally, every step they take is someone perfectly timed with a random patron raising their hands and bracing for the weight of 185+ lb. grown men stepping down atop them. Or, they’re stepping all over people violently and inconsiderately. Head stomps are some vicious acts, if anyone’s played Street Fighter, and stepped on peoples’ heads as Chun Li or M. Bison.
But of course, since they’re soccer players that nobody in the United States knows, a spontaneous game of soccer on top of peoples’ heads has to break out. Out of nowhere, this ball magically appears, and these soccer players begin kicking it around to each other. With balance on top of peoples’ bodies as extraordinary if they were on the field, they kick these long volleys to each other, despite the fact that mere split seconds prior, they were within arm’s length of one another. Ignore the fact that one missed kick would probably result in the punting of someone’s scalp, ear, or general face, which then constitutes as assault and would get one of these guys put in the slammer for a long time, but the great game!
It’s laughable when one of the guys does the bicycle kick, and naturally lands softly despite the fact that a grown man’s body is falling on top of a few people, and the physics behind that doesn’t result in four or five people collapsing under the falling weight of another human being. But the question is, where the fuck are they kicking the ball to? It’s not like there’s some net or a goal to be targeting, and despite that, there’s no goalie to oppose. What’s more shallow than an uncontested finish line?
No matter, because the game ends as spontaneously as it began, and the soccer players get to the platform where the Pepsi machine is supposed to be. Lo and behold, it’s gone, and the soccer players are suddenly perplexed! They turn and scan the crowd, and suddenly, they spot the Pepsi machine! Not only is it turned on it side and being crowd-surfed, but one of their fellow soccer players who nobody knows, happens to be sitting on top of it, drinking his own Pepsi. I’m amazed at the strength of the people in the crowd, because despite the fact that there are thousands of people, the area of the machine is still being supported by just a few people, and amazingly the four or five people supporting the weight of an entire Pepsi machine as well as human being sitting atop it are evidently Olympic strongmen.
In the end, Pepsi spent god knows how much money to create a 60 second commercial, with several high-profile soccer players to endorse, despite the fact that probably 90% of Americans don’t know who they are, and a metric fuck-ton of CGI to simulate the people getting trampled by the soccer players, who obviously were green screened as well. A Pepsi can is actually visible for all of five seconds of the entire commercial, and a few more seconds did the actual Pepsi logo be visible. Aside from the glimpses of the can and the machine, the commercial didn’t even display or flash any blues to reinforce the brand’s primary color. And most importantly, the commercial simply did not make any sense.
And this, is why this is such a stupid commercial.
