The Wallflowers' Coca-Cola Commercial - Sell Out or Smart Move?

was not impressed with the "Life Tastes Good" campaign. It said, "None of the first three U.S. spots is awful, exactly, but none is especially strong. The listlessness resides in the narrative, or lack thereof. One vignette . . . shows Wallflowers frontman Jakob Dylan ducking backstage before a concert encore. And that's it. Nothing actually happens. Aristotle taught us that stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. These are just middles: Young Dylan is just catching a quick chug before going back on stage . . . These are all about the mood of the moment, but the viewer requires more. For the Coke work to resonate, the stories have to strike some universal chord, some bit of humanity, some statement at least to be understated. Never mind a selling proposition; these spots have no proposition at all-not counting the shockingly generic slogan, `Life tastes good.' Hard to say whether consumers will respond to that, but the people at Quaker will be delighted. Life cereal does taste good, until it gets too soggy. (`Hey, Jakob! He likes it!')."

It's true that the commercial doesn't tell a whole story, but then how much of a story can someone effectively tell in 30-seconds without one word spoken? On whole, I find it to be a tastefully done commercial. My only gripe is that it's not really a Wallflowers commercial, but a Jakob Dylan commercial, since the other Wallflowers barely make an appearance. One gets the impression that Coca-Cola thought that Jakob was the only Wallflower who really mattered.

Thankfully, Coca-Cola agreed to let the Wallflowers use "Letters from the Wasteland" in the commercial, rather than a Coke jingle. While I must admit that I've never run to the record store in response to hearing a song played in a TV commercial, I've discovered that others have. If that's the case for the Wallflowers, then I think that the Coke commercial was a smart move on their part--and maybe just what they need to reignite interest in "Breach."

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