This is a nice slick ad for these lightweight shoes. It starts with people running with glowing balloons, and they start to run together, and all the runners congregate to put their balloons together into the shape of the shoe, which floats up into the sky. What a great way to demonstrate the point of the shoes being used in running, and to make the point of how light they are. I don’t like that music particularly, but the visuals are great! It’s very pretty to look at, and they make their point about the lightness of the shoes in an extremely memorable way which is visually beautiful to behold. Nicely done.
I found myself wondering what was lighting the balloons from the inside, and how hard must it have been to string that shoe shape together so it worked. Well, silly me: they faked it. I wouldn’t have known about it, but they’re so spastic about not pissing off hippies that they grovel to the green crowd about how they didn’t damage the environment by letting balloons go into the air. Instead, they damaged the environment by using a lot more electricity to fake it all using computers and such, whereas they could have just collected the deflated balloon shoe when it came down the next day. Helium balloons can only stay aloft for so long, and with it being such a huge shape, they could easily have followed it and collected it when it came down. But even easier would have been to just attach a string to the shoe balloon sculpture and let it go up, shoot it, and then pull it down again. Then they could have painted out the string. Oh, but then they would have had to actually do it, and it’s probably really hard to get it to work right in real life, so CGI becomes necessary.
But why apologize for theoretically threatening the environment when they simply could have said they were too incompetent or lazy to pull it off for real, so they cheated? Then they would have skirted the issue of the environment entirely while informing everyone they didn’t actually release any balloons. Or wouldn’t that have kissed enough smelly tree-hugging hippie butt? I guess if your product doesn’t actively propagandize for the green movement, it might get harassed for its manufacturing carbon footprint, huh? So better to nip it in the bud, even though that expression sounds like it’s being violent to a plant. But then again, they’re selling running shoes, and running makes people get all hot, causing global warming, and then they breathe really hard too, which releases more greenhouse gasses, destroying the planet. So I guess they really ought to grovel, lest anyone realize what they’re encouraging.
Here’s the slick floating shoe spot:
