Saturday, February 11, 2012

We Interrupt These Commercials to Bring You the Following Game

Last Sunday was Super Bowl Sunday, one of my favorite Sundays of the year.  The Super Bowl was founded in the mid 60s to create a venue to determine the best team in football, and also to create a venue for multi-million dollar advertising spots.  Over time, the commercials have taken an increasingly prominent share of the post game conversation and have become in some ways even bigger than the game.

For many the iconic Super Bowl commercial involved a football player named "Mean" Joe Green, a young boy, a bottle of coke, and a souvenir jersey.  Even if it aired before your time, you have probably seen this 30 second clip of commercial gold.  Unfortunately, awesome advertising is difficult to create.  This can be proven by the number of commercials that businesses spend incredible amounts of money to create, which range in quality from mind-numbingly lame to exquisitely unmemorable.

While there were many duds to choose from again this year, Coca-Cola gets my nod for "biggest waste of money" this go round. Lacking any real inspiration, the team at Coke decided to pull the semi-iconic polar bears out of the closet.

Unfortunately, they were unable to create a story line with any semblance of meaningfulness or humor.  I suppose watching a computer animated bear stumble across the ice, juggling a bottle of coke the whole way while juking and jiving around other bears was supposed to be some sort of homage to football, but I couldn't get past the fact that Coke isn't sold in glass bottles anymore, unless you get them from Mexico, and I doubt polar bears would be importing their sugary beverages from that far south.  Plus, just how shook up would that bottle of soda be by the time he was done flipping it around?  It should have looked like he dropped a Mentos in that thing when he finally popped the top off.

So here's my polar bear commercial, with an homage to the past.  Polar bears are finishing a game of football out on the ice.  One of the bears is walking into the entrance of the cave.  A young polar bear stops him and hands him a plastic bottle of coke to quench his thirst.  He looks around for something to hand the cub, but realizes he has nothing to give him, as polar bears don't wear jerseys.  Polar bear looks off into the distance.  We see some seals lying near the water.  Camera zooms in on one of the seals.  Back to the Polar bear, with a look on his face that says "problem, I just found your solution".  Polar bear hands cub his coke and walks away.  We hear a roar and some struggling.  Polar bear walks back into frame, takes coke back from cub, and heads into the cave.  He stops, turns around, and throws the lad a seal skin.  The end.  If that doesn't tug at your heartstrings I don't know what will.