Canada Dry - inventing a market for their product

Imagine a world where Girl Scout cookies are made from real girl scouts, and ginger ale was made from  real ginger.

Not THIS type of ginger. Although that does solve some problems in the world...

Canada Dry has made the latter the truth. Their ginger ale is made from real ginger! Great...who cares. I mean, seriously, who likes ginger ale?

Well, Canada Dry has taken a page from the pharmaceutical companies as they attempt to invent a market for their product. Think about it, the med companies do it all the time. Seriously, there is no way we'd survive as a species let alone be at the top of the food chain if at least half of us were so messed up that we truly needed prescription meds to keep us going.  Anyway, this blog isn't about the stupidity of pharmaceutical ads...I've already covered that. This is about Canada Dry.

You may have seen the ad. It premiered several months ago, and they recently brought it back during the Holiday season, because apparently the "working up a sweat in the field" thing they have going on on the ad rings true during the holiday season. Watch.

The ad starts with  a group of people who do not look like any farm worker I see out here working the many fields of the San Joaquin valley harvesting, of all things, ginger. As they work, one farmer yanks on a plant and out pops a bottle of ginger ale. Then another yanks out a vending machine full of the stuff. 
 
I'll even refrain from commenting on the silliness of pulling out cans and a vending machine. The stupidest thing of this ad is the assertion that nothing hits the spot when you're hot, sweaty and thirsty, as a nice can of ginger ale. 

Really?

 This baby just tried ginger ale for the first time. 

For some reason, when I've worked up a truly vicious thirst making fun of commercials, ginger ale doesn't come to mind as something to quench that thirst. I guess I can't begrudge them for trying to expand past the normal market: mixed drinks and old people who remember prohibition when they drank ginger ale.

 

Somehow, I just don't see it catching on when there supermarket shelves filled with drinks, healthy and unhealthy, that quench your thirst without tasting like ass. 

A holiday tradition...of creepiness and bad parenting: Campbells Soup Winter Commercial

I am no doubt the first to tell you it's Christmas time and as such, we will be bombarded by a ceaseless parade of advertisements meant to play on our love of the season and spending unsustainable amounts of money to make sure the Christmas spirit of crippling debt is left alive.

What, too cynical?

Some commercials have been around for so long they play not just on our need to get the best gadget for Christmas, but also our sense of nostalgia. Enter Campbell's Soup.

I used to love that commercial, because seeing it I knew it was Christmas time. When I was a bit older, I love it because I knew it meant it was winter time, and when you live in the desert like I did, winter time means you can now touch your car door handle without needing skin grafts afterward.

But now, I realize this commercial displays not only a level of creepiness, but of some questionable parenting at best.

First off, let's look at the opening scene.

I recognize that this commercial was filmed some time ago...so long ago they probably actually used film. But it wasn't produced so long ago that letting your kid play outside unattended was necessarily considered great parenting. Especially in a fricking blizzard.

But I don't think the kid was playing in the snow...I think he was left outside to serve as his parents' outdoor decoration. He was just standing there, covered in snow, until he apparently received a union-mandated soup break.

Then things just get weird. Not that a walking snowman outside of the Frosty cartoon isn't weird. But take a look at this:

I'll concede that the poor kid standing out there for hours could end up covered in snow and resemble a snowman. But, how the hell did his arms turn to sticks? Apparently his parents aren't just shitty, there is some sort of fairytale evil stepmom and warlock thing going on.

But by the power of Campbells condensed soup, the spell is lifted (or the snow melts, if you take it at face value, you poor fool) and we see....AAAH! A GINGER!

Maybe the parents weren't evil, he was sentenced to snowman for his crimes of being a ginger. And looks what happens when he's released from his icy cell:

Yeah, you see a smiling kid. I see someone who just ate a bowl of Chicken Noodle and Soul Soup. That's right, the little sucker just took someone's soul and made it in to a rich, savory broth. Cambell's Soup is worse than Soylent Green...it's PEOPLE.....'s souls.

Or I'm just reaching. I DO love their soup...