There's a commercial running for a Playstation game called "Mafia II."
A music track by Dean Martin plus game animation of people shooting each other with tommy guns, ending with a POV shot from a grave as dirt is being tossed in by mafia goons.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Coke is so phat, NOT
This bus signage "Coke is so phat" appeared in NYC about twenty years ago, as I recall, done by some tactical marketing outfit in a vain attempt to make Coca-Cola relevant to the Gen-Xers, or whichever alphabetized and lobotomized group was presumed to dominate then.
"Phat" is a term from the 70's, which I naturally despised the first time I encountered it, combining as it did antiphrasis in its clumsiest form with the purposeful misspelling common to the hip-hop underclass.
But more to the point, could anything be less sexy, less cool, less "in" than Coca-Cola, the most lowbrow fizz-water of the twentieth century?
its presence is so ubiquitous, its very existence so mundane, one cannot imagine how it could suffuse society more thoroughly short of a mandatory intravenous drip in every citizen.
But so profound is the conceit of large marketers that once having bought every GRP, having saturated every commercial venue, they desperately seek to implant their lugubrious pretenses of importance into the most primitive reptilian segments of the brain.
And their ad agencies, palsied with fear of losing the business, partner with the latest purveyors of marketing flimflams — assuming, that is, that the client hasn't already beaten a path to these thimble-riggers.
The mundane nature of a soft drink makes it impervious to becoming a social marker. It is fool's errand to fatuously attempt to transform it into something other than a sugary substance to swill down.
~~~
n.b.: It goes without saying that I loathe the very structure of this post's headline, tacking "not" on the end in a ham-handed attempt to connote sarcasm or irony.
"Ironic" itself is a term feebly appropriated by the young (most of whom would be hard pressed to properly define it) as their dominant weltschmerz. The more accurate descriptor would be cynical.
"Phat" is a term from the 70's, which I naturally despised the first time I encountered it, combining as it did antiphrasis in its clumsiest form with the purposeful misspelling common to the hip-hop underclass.
But more to the point, could anything be less sexy, less cool, less "in" than Coca-Cola, the most lowbrow fizz-water of the twentieth century?
its presence is so ubiquitous, its very existence so mundane, one cannot imagine how it could suffuse society more thoroughly short of a mandatory intravenous drip in every citizen.
But so profound is the conceit of large marketers that once having bought every GRP, having saturated every commercial venue, they desperately seek to implant their lugubrious pretenses of importance into the most primitive reptilian segments of the brain.
And their ad agencies, palsied with fear of losing the business, partner with the latest purveyors of marketing flimflams — assuming, that is, that the client hasn't already beaten a path to these thimble-riggers.
The mundane nature of a soft drink makes it impervious to becoming a social marker. It is fool's errand to fatuously attempt to transform it into something other than a sugary substance to swill down.
~~~
n.b.: It goes without saying that I loathe the very structure of this post's headline, tacking "not" on the end in a ham-handed attempt to connote sarcasm or irony.
"Ironic" itself is a term feebly appropriated by the young (most of whom would be hard pressed to properly define it) as their dominant weltschmerz. The more accurate descriptor would be cynical.
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