One Comment on Superbowl Ads

Avoiding Janet's bustout and the game itself, one comment on Pepsi's iTunes downloaders ad. Even though the ad played on how downloading is cool, there's already chatter on how well the ad condemned illegal behavior (as the RIAA would like file-sharing to be perceived, or whether the ad glorifies downloading. Me, I'll take a page from Tom Frank and call it neither: it's classic hipster appropriation. Like it has for decades, Pepsi sees what it thinks is cool 'youthful' behavior (in this case file-sharing), and tries to associate that behavior with drinking its sugared, colored, fizzy water. In past campaigns, they pulled this off with transparent slogans (Pepsi Generation), but this time they couldn't even pretend there was anything to do between soda and downloading (or at least not Pepsi - isn't Mountain Dew the geeks' chosen fuel?). So they paid Apple to let them give away iTunes passes. Forget whether it was positive or negative for file-sharing; in my book the lawyers did a superb job of making it entirely ambiguous and defensible either way. But what it does demonstrate is that file-sharing is entirely mainstream. It is something 60 million Superbowl viewers will understand in 30 seconds. Considering Napster didn't exist 5 years ago, that's an incredible testament to the change wrought by P2P. But I still don't think it'll make Pepsi any cooler.

Posted by thomasgoetz, February 2, 2004 03:50 PM | | TrackBack