Opinion: Coke on Thin Ice
Jan 25, 2010
- Barbara Lippert, Adweek
"Snowball,",
性交性爱; the first of two 60-second Coca-Cola spots created by Wieden + Kennedy for the Winter Olympics (and launched recently on American Idol), o
pens on a cozy, snow-covered sign that reads: "Olympic Village, Whistler, B.C."
With that established, we move on to our hero Coke drinker, a young Canadian athlete (we can tell from the maple leaf and "Canada" on his red-and-white uniform) who gets the bottle knocked out of his hand by an act of nature -- a chunk of snow launched by a falling icicle. He thinks someone hit him with a snowball. A team
mate next to him takes offense, too.
"Hey, Sven, Gustav and Magnus -- get a load of this!" the first guy seems to be saying, as he lobs a few snowballs at his ostensibly Swedish rivals. (There's no dialog, only winter sounds and music.) We can tell this is the Swedish team because of the giant Ikea sign behind them. Actually, no -- it's their
light-blue and yellow uniforms. That and the platinum hair (a
wig?) one of them sports. The typecasting throughout is so humorless yet surreal that some characters seem to come straight out of an old Mentos commercial.
Then the action, um, snowballs. The world joins in (or at least, the American, Russian and Japanese teams do) in a strained, politically correct way. And our hero embarks on a dangerous trek amid flying snow to a distant Coke machine to replace his lost bottle.
As with
many Coke spots past, the iconic cola brand is supposed to serve here as the galvanizer for some high-energy high jinks and global kumbaya. But the merriment is as forced as the caricature -- like team members. Mostly, the snowball fight doesn't seem all that much fun, despite the care, expert cutting and CG that clearly went into it.
There's tension and hostility lurking under the surface -- just like at the real Olympics or, for that matter, at NBC, broadcaster of the upcoming games. Never mind all the late-night programming problems and squabbles. The icing on the icing for NBC is that the rising costs of rights and waning of ad sales mean it will apparently lose money on the
games for the first time.
As for this Coke spot, despite some fun winter-sport references in the course of our guy's cross-compound trek (a hockey shot, a slalom move, a snowboard used as a shield), it never gels. Unlike Coke's polar bears, who basked in the aurora borealis while lazing around their frozen tundra, and who somehow appealed to the Snuggie wearer inside us all, "Snowball" hardly warms us up to the idea of having a cold one.
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