This ad is ridiculous! Mark Cuban wants the last Diet Mountain Dew at a convenience store, so he makes the guy who is holding it all kinds of ridiculously extravagant offers for it, but unbelievably, the guy refuses because Diet Mountain Dew is so delicious and refreshing, it’s literally worth millions of dollars per bottle, and we’re all lucky they don’t raise the price to reflect its actual market value. Thank God for small favors.
Why doesn’t Mark Cuban just have this guy killed before he can get the bottle up to his lips? Cuban’s got Bond Villain money and power, so he must have some ninja assassins on his payroll, right? Plus, his name is “Cuban”, and Cuba is a communist dictatorship, just like the bad guys in Bond movies, right? So he must be a Bond villain, and as such, he probably didn’t have the guy killed because he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s a Bond villain. (Pretty sneaky there! But I’m not fooled!) [<Just kidding: I am fooled.]
But seriously: Mark Cuban could hire a guy whose job it is to always have a Diet Mountain Dew ready for him wherever he goes, and whenever he may want one. Or else, Mark Cuban could hire a guy whose job it is to beat up every guy who tries to hog the last Diet Mountain Dew and take it from him, and then hand it over to Mark Cuban. (Maybe the next ad will be this guy doing the job of getting that last Diet Mountain Dew, but then snapping, betraying his boss, and drinking the soda himself, because Diet Mountain Dew is so irresistibly delicious and refreshing, it will make you betray your own best interests to drink one. And then next they could make an ad where a CIA spy is captured by Iran, and they get him to betray the United States and tell them all of our secrets for a Diet Mountain Dew. And now that they have made these ads, Iran will actually start using Diet Mountain Dew as a weapon against us, defeating America with our own desire for Diet Mountain Dew: Oh, the humanity! We must ban this dangerous Diet Mountain Dew that makes everyone betray our country before it’s too late!) Isn’t this how President Obama has been characterizing rich people all along anyway: they play by a different set of rules that’s unfair to everyone else? This could actually be a political ad, where Mark Cuban has this guy roughed up, he takes the Diet Mountain Dew from him, and then we cut to President Obama and he says: “See: The rich think they can just take whatever they want with impunity; and if you vote for Mitt Romney, Mark Cuban will beat all of you up and take your sodas! Of course, if you vote for me, I’ll ban sodas due to the obesity epidemic, and I’ll allow Mark Cuban to do that stuff anyway because he supports my campaign, but that’s not what this election is about.”
But what irks me, apart from how much I don’t like this ad strategy of showing people doing ridiculously exaggerated and bizarre things to try to get the product when it’s easy enough to just go buy one, is that they have hired Mark Cuban for the ad. Mark Cuban in an ad for Diet Mountain Dew? Cuban is ridiculously wealthy: he doesn’t need a job! But there are tons of people in America right now who really do (Dew) need a job! Why not hire one of them instead of just throwing even more money at Mark Cuban? I hope he is at least donating his salary to charity. How about instead just going with the usual Mountain Dew extreme sports strategy, and show Shawn White’s mug shot, and then re-enact his crime spree, and claim it only happened because White lost control when some guy denied him that last Diet Mountain Dew, like what happens to Mark Cuban in this ad. (And yes, I know Shawn White is rich too, but at least that would have lampooned his arrest, as well as finally revealing the dangers of convenience stores running low on Diet Mountain Dew: surely one of the greatest threats to this country today!)
Or, perhaps this ad campaign could continue as it is, but with a new tag, where the rich guy who does not get the Diet Mountain Dew despite his attempts at bribery says: “Right! I’ll Dew you for that!” Or perhaps they could sexualize this campaign by having a series of hot models say to a guy: “Dew me!” (But he would rather drink it himself, leaving them all frustrated.)
But you know, one way to use the extreme sports strategy and also sell the Diet Mountain Dew would be to have some extreme sports guy (like Shawn White) in a big fat suit (like Eddie Murphy or Martin Lawrence wears in their comedy movies), and show him trying to skateboard or snowboard, but he keeps breaking his board, or he can’t fit through certain spaces, etc.; and so he drinks the Diet Mountain Dew, and he shrinks down to normal size and becomes his regular self. Or would that appear too obviously and ridiculously dishonest? And I guess it would be politically incorrect too. (Except that political correctness appears not to apply whenever it’s applied to anyone who does something that’s the target of government policies, like smokers, or obese people; in that case, it seems you can slander and bash them all you like, since it’s part of a political agenda to stamp out their behavior for the {alleged} betterment of society.)
Here’s the refreshingly deceptive advertising:
