Thanks to loyal reader Yale Hollander for calling my attention to the sweet and bouncy Ripple commercial below. Contrary to the mood expressed in this spot, Ripple belonged to a category of beverage known as “street wine”, also referred to as “slum wine,” “ghetto wine,” or just plain “hooch.” Other examples included Thunderbird and Night Train Express. Unknown to me was the fact that the marketers of Ripple, made by E & J Gallo, had ever schemed to position the wine as remotely acceptable to, say, a bountiful Thanksgiving dinner, as shown here. Ripple’s alcohol content was considerably higher than that of respectable wine — notwithstanding the fact that the label read “light wine” and the commercial winks that the brew packs “twice the pleasure.” Needless to say, efforts to position Ripple as a suburban-friendly vintage proved unavailing.
Not to feel sorry for myself, but I spent most of the Super Bowl sitting next to a 400-pound doofus in the Delta terminal at LaGuardia. The commercials — in my opinion, not his -- largely sucked. Except for this one:
Google, which rakes in billions of dollars of advertising without buying hardly any advertising of its own, ran a Super Bowl spot today. Said CEO Eric Schmidt: “If you watched the Super Bowl this evening you’ll have seen a video from Google called “Parisian Love”. In fact you might have watched it before, because it’s been on YouTube for over three months. We didn’t set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search. Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it’s had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience.” One can only guess at the real motive. In any event, in case you missed it:
Third World sweatshop scandal, what Third World sweatshop scandal? Nike joins in the fight against HIV//AIDs in Africa with his new commercial, featuring Didier Drogba, Andrei Arshavin, Clint Dempsey, Denilson, Marco Materazzi, Javier Mascherano, Fabio Cannavaro along with Maria Sharapova and Kobe Bryant. Well done!
Quite aside from all of the tasteless, sophomoric Super Bowl ads that make it to broadcast, there are now spots created intentionally to be “banned” in the hope they might go viral via social media. Below, one reputed such currently “under review” by CBS. It’s lame, of course, but not nearly so tasteless as the notorious Snickers commercial a few years back, the one in which two car mechanics inadvertently kiss, then rip out their chest hair.
