Pepsi: The Official Drink Of The NFL...The Fuck Is This Bullshit?

These last few weeks, I've been to a lot of auditions for Pepsi. All of them have been tied to the NFL. Why?
Well, because Pepsi is the official somethingorother for the National Football League.
Yes. Because when one of these massively overpaid and performance-enhancing-drug-soaked meat things tromps off the field, the first thing they crave, the first thing for which they yearn...is an ice cold Not Coke.
They don't want to kill and eat a deer with nothing but their hands and teeth, they don't want to drink beer out of a prostitute, they want corn syrup laced with sugar.

I recently booked a Pepsi radio spot for the upcoming football season*. It's being produced by Mekanism, a company I've worked with before who are all awesome, and the spot is awesome. It's something along the lines of "football is a bunch of grown men in matching outfits chasing a ball around". The next part is something about how (for some odd reason) drinking Pepsi makes doing so exciting.
As funny and irreverent as the marketing is, it's still marketing and has to conform to the client's guidelines/requirements/demands and serve to show all us teeming, sweaty, retarded masses that Pepsi is what we need to get us closer to whatever we consider God, but, at least it's making fun of football and those who slavishly bow to it...on national TV, well played guys. But, this Pepsi radio thing I went out for yesterday?
Ugh.
I sincerely hope that Mekanism isn't responsible for it. It's abysmal**. It actually contains the line "maybe drinking Pepsi will inspire us". Unless that line is delivered in the most inbred, dumbfuck voice one can muster...I can't even finish the sentence.
"Maybe drinking Pepsi will inspire us"? Are you fucking kidding me?
Your company makes billions of dollars a year and the best you could afford is "maybe drinking Pepsi will inspire us"?

All right.
Wait.
Hang on.

I think I just got it as I was pounding out that last line...I get it now.
Pepsi...is happy being Pepsi.
They know they'll never be Coke, they know that no one will ever have both available and choose their corn syrup swill over Coke's...so they're perfectly fine with shitty advertizing like that.
Or, maybe, they were so happy with the witty stuff Mekanism came up with that they're content with just one commercial that doesn't make people want to die because of how stupid it is.
"Guys? Not everything we do completely sucks ass! WOOO!"
Good for them.
Know your place.
If you're Pepsi, then, by gum, be happy with who you are!

Whatever happens, no matter how stupid Pepsi ads get or how blindly people stumble after football players, gibbering and yanking at their sopping crotches, I will always have the moment when I saw the guy from Pepsi drinking Coke at that session.
I will hold that in my heart.
Forever.





* My first time serving as, ostensibly, a VO extra; you can hear me as the announcer on the TV amidst a crowd of fans and buried under a full on announcer guy. But, the money's green so the light is, also, green which means the trap is clean.

** For a soft drink commercial. As anything more, it's actual poison.