Protagonist?

It’s happened to all of us.

“What has?” I hear you ask.

I’ll explain the situation.

I’m walking along, in a red hoodie, jeans and my yellowish shoes, a backpack on my back and my huge headphones over my ears playing one of the jumpy David Crowder songs. A bottle of Coca Cola sticking out of my bag, the sun shining, and my glasses shading.

So the thought pops into my head.

It’s like I’m in a Coca Cola Advert.

Oh come on, admit it, you’ve thought it about yourself at least once before.

An even better experience happened last semester. I might have written about it before.

Same hoodie, same soft drink, it was a cloudy day and I had just walked out of a lecture at Gateway. I pull out the bottom of Cola, and as I take a swing, the sun peeps through the clouds, my glasses shade and a happy song comes onto my ipod. I mean come on! I actually looked around for a camera crew. It was too perfect.

It doesn’t have to be an advert you ‘find yourself in’.

It could be a music video, while you’re on the bus, or walking along a dark road.

Hell, there are those who think their life would make a good film, and the least self-centered who see only certain situations as film scene worthy.

So what makes us all picture scenes from our lives on the silver screen, be it in an advert, or a film, or a music video?

My thought is that, we have been exposed to so much of these typical scenes used for typical reasons, that they have become installed in our heads. I mean think about it: how many times have we seen someone feeling hot (temperature), drinking, beer or soft drink and suddenly feeling fresh and cool? Thousands of times! It’s become a norm.

In fact, most drink adverts nowadays are just different ways of showing this concept.

It’s that, or the drink giving you some form of power or super human strength.

This irritates me sometimes. Seriously, what does Pepsi have to do with a group of footballers and a team of Sumo wrestlers playing? Fun idea and all, but drinking the soft drink has no connection.

Fanta and CocaCola adverts recently have reached for a link wit music. Again. What?!!

Fair enough, the advertisers manage to find very interesting and cool ways of showing all the above mentioned pre-set ideas.

Most of you know my excitement at seeing one particular Sprite Advert. It’s the one showing a group of youths suffering the heat around a basketball court, when one of them takes a sip of Sprite then removing his T-shirt jumps into the court which ‘magically’ turns into a pool. The implication is that the drinking of the soft drink had something to do with it, but think about it, it’s basically ‘I was hot, I drank the drink, I cooled down.’

But at least they found a really interesting and original way of showing it. I applauded it the first time I saw it alone in my living room, and I still think it is an epic advert.

No body would ever imagine that as they drink a soft drink by a basketball court, and that’s what makes it great.

CocaCola made a series of fantastic adverts quite a few months ago. The Happiness Factory Adverts, in which the idea is that there is a whole wonderful and crazy imaginative world inside the CocaCola vending machines.

Amazing, they broke away from the norm. They made us imagine, they made us think, they took a question a child would ask, (How does the Coke come out?), and answered in a way a child’s innocence and imagination would believe. It reminds us of the imagination we once had and makes us wish it where true.

Incredible.

What the advertising world really needs, I mean REALLY needs, is to give me a job.