These are the ones from this year’s Super Bowl I’m referring to. There were like three or four of them this year: that’s a lot of money to plunk down for ads. I hope they sell a lot of Coke to polar bears after this! I thought polar bears were endangered or something, but hey, if Coke is willing to pay over $10 Million for Super Bowl ads to market soft drinks to them, there must be more polar bears than I thought. (Either that, or they drink a lot of cola per capita!)
And speaking of the polar bears, they seem pretty healthy in these ads. And you know, their habitat looks pretty solid in these ads, too. There doesn’t appear to be too much of a melting ice caps issue with these polar bears. And since Coca Cola made these commercials where the polar bears and their habitat look so healthy and stuff, does that mean the Coca Cola company is a gaggle of global warming deniers? It just seems like these ads are an attempt at propaganda to trick us into believing global warming is a myth! And it must be tricking the planet too, because all of Europe is frozen solid and covered with piles of thick snow and ice many feet deep right about now, and they have been for a few weeks now, too. But maybe these ads are working! They’ve made the polar bears seem so cute and fun, Mother Nature has taken a shine to them again, and she’s decided to freeze half the Earth for them this winter! Thanks Coca Cola, for apparently solving global warming!*
So there’s the global warming denying angle of this polar bears campaign, making them seem so healthy and robust, and then there’s the animal abusing angle, too. In one of these ads, one of the polar bears trips and starts to lose control of his Coke bottle, and then the other polar bears try to help him catch it, with the result that they all end up getting clobbered and injured by crashing into each other, at which time the Coke bear gets his Coke back in control. Then he looks back to survey the damage: the other bears are sprawled out all over the ice, injured to the last bear! Quick, call the polar bear ambulance! (At least they have plenty of ice to keep the swelling down!) Oh, but Coke seems to think this is all funny somehow! What animal-abusing bullies! Have they no heart? I guess that’s why their label is red: to make up for their own lack of warmth, caring and heart!
Shame on them for abusing cartoon CGI polar bears: they’re the most endangered of all, with these maniacs controlling them like this! Why, this ad is no better than a circus act, enslaving endangered animals to do tricks for our amusement, injuring them all for our purported delight! Shame on them, treating imaginary representations of real animals like this! What’s next: torturing CGI people? (Oh, I guess video games already do that, huh? Maybe we need an Amnesty International video game to try to shut down the brutal fighting games that kill and maim so many innocent CGI characters whose only crime is that they were programmed into a cruel and uncaring world! Oh, the simulated humanity!)
Okay, so now we come to the last Coca Cola polar bears spot I saw during the Super Bowl: This is the one where the male polar bear, the one who watched the game on TV at home, gets upset because his team apparently lost the game, so he wanders outside and onto the edge of the iceberg or glacier (or whatever they’re on) and lets out a frustrated roar of disappointment. This commercial also sent a very different message to me than the one I think they intended: When I saw this ad, the first thing that went through my mind was that this scenario, minus the football game idea, would make a great commercial for an environmental group to raise awareness about global warming/climate change/whatever they’re calling it now. So let’s say this polar bear is watching TV, and instead of a football game that’s on, they show news of an oil spill, or news of a new oil pipeline; then the polar bear gets up, goes outside, and roars a loud, frustrated roar of disapproval. Then the announcer could come on and talk about how polar bears are endangered, that their habitat is threatened, and here’s what you can do to try to help (like call Greenpeace, or sign some online petition, or whatever it is they’re trying to do).
And I was thinking about that, this alternate idea for how this spot could be used, when I saw this ad during the Super Bowl, and not about Coke. In fact, this whole polar bears drinking Coca Cola thing has never really worked for me: the ads are cute, but it doesn’t make me want to drink Coke because it makes it look like I'd attract dangerous polar bears. I suppose it's intended to make Coca Cola seem environmentally conscious and stuff, but I just think about all the people the bears must have horribly killed to get those bottles of Coke. And then I think about how I'm next if I buy Coke. (I know those polar bears are following me around, waiting to strike!) But I suppose it’s better than advertising hot tea or coffee with polar bears, because then it would look like it’s the warm drink that’s responsible for all the melting ice caps!
And I was thinking about that, this alternate idea for how this spot could be used, when I saw this ad during the Super Bowl, and not about Coke. In fact, this whole polar bears drinking Coca Cola thing has never really worked for me: the ads are cute, but it doesn’t make me want to drink Coke because it makes it look like I'd attract dangerous polar bears. I suppose it's intended to make Coca Cola seem environmentally conscious and stuff, but I just think about all the people the bears must have horribly killed to get those bottles of Coke. And then I think about how I'm next if I buy Coke. (I know those polar bears are following me around, waiting to strike!) But I suppose it’s better than advertising hot tea or coffee with polar bears, because then it would look like it’s the warm drink that’s responsible for all the melting ice caps!
So here are the Coke polar bears ads I’m referring to, starting with the first one where they’re watching the game, and one bear has all its fingers and toes crossed (I didn’t specify anything about this ad, but it’s cute):
Here’s the bear mauling spot, where Coke is responsible for grievous bodily harm to numerous innocent polar bears (for shame! I know it’s a joke on football, but it also looks like they’re abusing animals, doesn’t it? Or are they getting revenge for all the recent human victims of bear maulings?):
And here’s the frustrated roar spot:
And you know, I didn’t know until I looked for these that the frustrated bear roaring about his team losing was meant to represent the Giants fans (!). So Coca Cola was assuming that the Giants would lose? Talk about a rude diss! Shouldn’t they have made one for each team losing, and just run the one for the appropriate team? I wrote a piece a couple of weeks back about Super Bowl ad insults, and this seems like yet another one that disses the Giants, automatically assuming they would lose. Oh well, maybe the official soft drink of the NY Giants is Pepsi. (It should be, after this!) Oh, well: I still like Coke better, even if they did insult my hometown team.
* Oh, and here’s a couple of news slideshows about the frozen tundra Europe is at the moment, just so you’ll know I’m not making it up:
And here is a Wikipedia page about what they’re calling the 2012 European cold wave:
