For those that didn't watch, it is a series of clips of people - presumably Americans - living life while "America the Beautiful" is played in the background. The kicker here is that it is a multi-lingual version of "America the Beautiful". This caused a bit of an uproar.
The message of course is one the Coke has portrayed for years as it is a global company with an American base and it is apparently for the diversification of America.
I will admit, at the start of the commercial, once the song switched languages, I had a very real problem with it. The first language was Spanish and I thought it was going to be some Spanish heritage commercial but using an incredibly patriotic song. However, once the third language kicked in and it became apparent it was a Coke commercial, all was forgiven. Seeing as I had this knee jerk reaction not 5 seconds into the commercial, I wasn't all that surprised to hear of outrage spreading across Twitter and other social media platforms; #SpeakAmerican was trending.
I was fine with people being mad about the commercial for singing that particular song in a non-english language, and I was fine with people forgetting that this country was founded by immigrants. After all, being ignorant is what people do. best. However, #SpeakAmerican? Really? America has no national language, so that settles that argument.
A few of my favorite tweets:
Coca Cola is the official soft drink of illegals crossing the border. #americaisbeautiful
-Todd Barnes (@toddbarnes) February 2, 2014
An american song in like 10 different languages #(expletive)coke #teampepsi
— James Butler (@jbutler6499) February 3, 2014
Actually, this whole DeadSpin page is pretty entertaining. Warning, foul language.
Although, it wasn't all negative feedback. Many people thoroughly enjoyed and embraced the message of diversity that Coke was conveying. People across the internet praised the commercial with sentiments such as "I haven't loved my country like this in a long time. Thankful for the reminder." and "I am in love with this commercial and don't care who knows!"
This beautiful commercial has exposed the harsh truth that there are still far too many ethnocentric people living in this world. It has exposed that we as a country have forgotten where we came from - we were all immigrants once. It has exposed that people have seemingly given up on the idea of the"melting pot" society that the United States is supposed to be. It has exposed us to the world as a country of unaccepting, uneducated, bigots.
On another note, what seemingly went unnoticed at first, and perhaps this is a glimmer of hope for our country, is that the commercial featured what is documented as the first gay couple ever shown in a Superbowl advertisement. So not only did Coke test the water with this commercial, it jumped right in without testing the temperature. Bravo Coca-Cola. Absolutely outstanding.
Perhaps it is because I go to UNI, which seems to have a "large" LGBT community and an even larger acceptance of it, that I am almost unaware of things such as the couple in the commercial. I know I missed it the first time around and had to actually go look for it once I heard about it. I can only hope that, by being further exposed to other people with different ethnic backgrounds and lifestyles, that our generation will be able to make things like this a non factor in the future.
This advertisement for Coke is a stroke of genius; it did exactly what is was supposed to do. We are still talking about it 2 days after the fact; how many commercials can say that?
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