I saw this spot where a guy brings a whole college mini-fridge full of Coffee-Mate Bliss onto a commercial airplane right after I got home from a long airline flight, and boy did it seem stupid after waiting in that long security line at the airport! The advertising agency does realize that containers of liquid larger than 3.4 ounces get confiscated by the TSA, right? Plus, the refrigerator is too big to fit in the overhead compartment, so he’d have to check it. After they confiscated and poured out all of his Coffee Mate Bliss, that is. (Maybe they should show a trash can full of Coffee-Mate Bliss 2 Go bottles to indicate how many people are trying to smuggle this stuff onto airplanes. Maybe they could even show a group of terrorists who get their bombs through the screening, but who decide to scrap the mission when they cannot bring along their Coffee-Mate Bliss 2 Go bottles to enjoy as a last meal before they martyr themselves.)
I mean, I get that this is a joke, but it’s just ridiculous. For this joke to actually work, they really should have had this guy’s refrigerator confiscated by the TSA agents, and then we cut to them all enjoying it during a break while the guy is miserable, suffering from withdrawal symptoms from his lack of Coffee-Mate Bliss on the airplane, where they only have tiny plastic servings of actual cream for him to enjoy. And this guy hates delicious, natural cream; he only likes to drink fake, artificially flavored chemicals out of a plastic bottle (but only if it’s cold enough, apparently).
These advertising jokes about people doing stuff like this on airplanes is really getting stale. They do it so much, and we all know nobody is allowed to do such things, and it spoils the joke, because it takes us out of the scenario when we say to ourselves: “Well, that couldn’t ever happen because of TSA regulations.” And no, it isn’t just me who thinks like this. Other people I know say they’ve had the same reaction to this and other ads that depict totally unrealistic things happening on airplanes and airports in ads nowadays. The other jokes are fun and silly, but the airplane part just doesn’t really work, I’m afraid, because this anti-terrorism inconvenience thing at the airports and on airplanes really rubs people the wrong way. A joke about the pain-in-the-ass flying nowadays is fine, but a completely not believable scenario like a guy bringing a refrigerator full of Coffee-Mate Bliss onto a commercial airline flight just makes us think of terrorism and security lines and such. Not really funny stuff to be thinking about while you’re watching an ad, and it distracts us from thinking about the product and the message of the spot; and any time we’re taken out of the commercial and distracted from thinking about the product in the ad is not good for the product. And I know lots of ad people don’t care about this as much as they should, but ads are all about the product and are supposed to serve the product, and when they don’t serve the product, they’re a waste for money for the company who commissioned them.
(BTW: I thought the rest of the segments of people with refrigerators full of Coffee-Mate in ridiculous places were fun and worked well, just not the airplane one. But one thing puzzles me: I thought the appeal of artificial creamers like Coffee-Mate was that they didn’t need to be refrigerated; if you have to refrigerate it, then why not just use half and half? It tastes a hell of a lot better to use natural cream than it does to use fake crap, doesn’t it?)
Here’s the awkward airline ad (It’s the last segment, but when I first saw this ad, it was truncated to show only the airplane segment, which is why it made such an impression on me right after I arrived from the airport after a six-hour flight.):
