f13.net

So around 1999/2000, Sprite aired a commercial I'm trying to find. It featured a bunch of movie execs sitting around a then-modern conference room talking about a new movie they were making (I think it was called "Slime" or "Slug"). It was a parody on the whole movie advertising industry. The chief exec guy would go around the room and point to a specific person asking for an update on their specific function. They talked about sponsorships, posters, movie name, and a soundtrak I think from Will Smith. The chief exec would always respond with "Nice" in a Jon Stewart/serious sorta way.

The very last thing covered was the script. After the whole commercial establishes just how much is going on with the movie, the script guy says "we don't have one yet, but I'm sure we can bang something out by Thursday". And the exec guy says "Nice" as the camera fades to a bottle of Sprite.

The whole riff on promoting a movie that has no thought going into the movie itself is something that has too many applications :)

I tried the usual places but couldn't find it.

Edit 1: Found the name of the movie they were making
Edit 2: Found a dead YouTube link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwiby2XxcR0). The screenshot is definitely from this commercial. Pulled from YouTube for some reason.

Is this it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q18TEfOsosg


Well maybe not but it's still awesome.

Pretty sure that would be my company's legal department.  This means I probably can't help, but I'll look around.  We actually have a media repository but I don't know that I have access to it.

EDIT: I learned very quickly that we are doing a Second Life promo, and now I feel dirty.  More than usual, that is.

Does this sound about right?

That's exactly it! Would love to just watch it, though having it I'd be able to sprinkle it into internal Powerpoint presentations :-)

UD_Delt- that wasn't it, but funny anyway!

Weeeeeell... I can't get it for you, but if you want I can attempt to get some screenshots.  It's interesting because there are seven different versions of it... I have not watched all seven.

If you ever come by Atlanta, I can show you all of the Coke commercials you could ever want to see.

Why can't you get the commercial then?  Rusty at hacking the Gibson old man?

Because it would amount to corporate theft.  How about that?

Oh shnap.

Yeah, it was removed from YouTube for a reason, and I don't need that action.  I actually could obtain the WMV from the repository, but there's a bullet saying "Requires Approval" so I'd at least be faced with some amount of paperwork OR circumventing the protections they put into place to keep me from simply saving the video to my hard drive.  Either one sucks for different reasons.  Otherwise I could probably upload every commercial we have made since the 1960s to YouTube... and I mean in every country/region on Earth.  There's some wacky shit in there.

:(:(:(:(:( I want that on dvd. They need to compile it and sell it. Badly.

Yeah, isn't it every advertiser's dream for consumers to actually buy commericals?

Obviously not, or the chucklefuck PR people at Coke would have been doing this every 10 years.

I also want a collection of pepsi ads, the choice of a new generation series was awesome. Too bad it still tasted like shit.

OK, that was almost blasphemy but you pulled it out at the end.  Anyway, one of the commercials I found while looking for the Death Slug movie one was fifteen seconds of two guys standing on the street nodding their heads with a blank look on their faces.  Toward the end, a woman in a sports bra jogs by and they track her.  I think it was an ad for Sprite, honestly can't remember. :awesome_for_real:

Wow, that's awesome. Both the commercial repository itself and your ability to access it. Next time I'm heading down the East Coast we'll link up.

Would love to know why it was pulled. I never get why commercials are pulled and locked in a vault. It's not like they're ever going to be relevant again, particularly since Sprite changed it's schtict in the early 2000s. So why not public-domain it? Did they get someone pissy at them for ripping on ad agencies?

Could be due to the contracts between us and the various ad agencies, can't say.  Likely it's just something as simple as that they don't want conflicting brand positioning floating out there.  I'd assume we own them, but again I can't say.  The ones I see, they are not necessarily the ones that made it to TV, you know.  The couple I actually watched had a title screen indicating the company that made it and other such stuff.  When I get bored, I'm going to dig into the Japanese ones.  That should be fun.