Beach Bum wrote:

I liked the Budweiser Wild West one. That was hilarious when the gangster guy suddenly broke into song after getting his drink. There were only a few good ones this year though, and I thought all the car ones were stupid. I know we are in a recession and the car companies are desperate for business but it seemed like we had an insane number of car commercials this year.

I fucking HATES that. It was a bunch of lazy tropes.

I hated the Darth Vader one too. It was indeed "cute", which is how polite people say that it was "so fucking gay that only someone as dull as Marge Simpson could enjoy it."

Douche McCallister wrote:

I liked the Doritos commercial with the creepy guy and some of the Pepsi Max commercials. Coke goes for "heart warming" and Pepsi goes for humor. Pepsi wins in my book.

I'll agree that Doritos had some good commercials this year. And I did like the sitcoms one too. Especially when Fonzie hit the flatscreen.

Pepsi doesn't win. Pepsi tries so damn hard to be hip, but it doesn't work. They consistently spend more money on advertising than Coca-Cola, and they are consistently #2 in the cola wars. They have not ONCE overtaken Coke in sales. Even during the New Coke debacle, when the basic Pepsi was outselling New Coke, Coke was still the overall winner due to its much stronger Diet sales. Not even the Pepsi Challenge, were people consistently picked Pepsi over Coke, could convince people to switch brands. When you spend as much on advertising as Pepsi and can't win sales, you suck.

Pepsi has had some good ads, such as the Cindy Crawford one, but they've had some terrible ones. The fly singing "Brown Sugar"? Awful. The kid getting sucked into the bottle? Overrated. The infamous diner spot where the Coke Delivery Guy won't give back the Pepsi? Petty and obnoxious.

An ad is only as successful as the sales it brings in, so objectively, every Pepsi ad, no matter how much it makes you smile, is a failure, because smiles don't translate into sales for Pepsi. Old Spice Guy was a huge hit with high college kids, but guess what? High college kids don't bother with deodorant, because the stench of weed is their deodorant. So the campaign was dropped.

Especially now, in the Instant Data Age, it's hard for advertising to be effective. It used to take months, or even a full year, to compile data on how effective an ad campaign was. Now, you can get the data in real-time. If Pepsi sees a sudden spike in sales, Coke finds out about it as it happens, rather than months after the fact.

In the olden days, perception of the efficacy of an ad campaign was just as important as actual efficacy. Because of this, the Pepsi Challenge actually was successful. It wasn't successful in driving sales in and of itself, but it scared the shit out of top Coke executives to the point where they had Coke reformulated specifically to beat Pepsi in taste tests. And New Coke did beat Pepsi in taste tests. But it lost customers for the same reason that Pepsi can't beat Coke: it was too sweet. Pepsi wins taste tests because it's sweeter. But when you're in it for the long haul instead of just a quick sip, that sweetness becomes grating to a lot of people.

Hard to say. Coke also has way more distribution deals. It doesn't matter if you go to Burger King, Wendy's, or McDonald's, you're getting Coke.

This probably also helps Coke a lot, because it conditions people to ask for Coke. I can only think of two places that carry Pepsi instead of Coke: Taco Bell and 99. Of those two, Taco Bell's the only one that I'd willingly give me money to, and I rarely buy drinks from them.

99 is like Friday's, except with shittier decor, a shittier menu, and smaller portions. Despite smaller portions and selection, they charge just as much as Friday's. So in other words, they fucking suck.

username wrote:

courtesy of roger eberts twitter feed, this cynic didnt much care for that commercial http://www.badassdigest.com/2011/02/07/lets-talk-about-that-volkswagonstar-wars-commercial

YES. This guy is on the mark completely.

Also, consider this: why is this kid emulating Darth Vader instead of Han or Luke? It is probably because he gets picked on at school, and he feels that Vader's methods are more befitting to be inflicted on his enemies. By encouraging this behaviour, the father is encouraging his son to act out in unhealthy ways that border on sociopathic. I imagine that similar scenes played out in the lives of Klebold and Harris.

Also, emboldening your son by deluding him into believing he has superhuman powers is only going to lead to more beatings for him at school.