9. The Sprite Advert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5ovZpscicY What's the best way to advertise the fizzy lemon drink Sprite to a national audience? By having the WCW wrestler Sting kick a little kid's a** of course. This late 90's video was commissioned by the Coca Cola company in the belief that Sting represented the 'cool' trend of wrestling amongst young people of the time. "Timmy, I'm here from the 'Dream Come True Fantasy Foundation'' Sting declares, before taking little Timmy to the living room and beating the hell out of him. The strange thing about this commercial is that the foundation Sting claims to be from sounds an awful lot like the Make A Wish Foundation. So what is the implication here? Did Sting just beat up a ten year old kid suffering from cancer? Whatever the creative logic was behind the video, it was pretty entertaining anyway. Sting might not want to recall the connotations of beating a kid with cancer up, but at least he was getting to be the starring role for one of America's very biggest brands. Not that watching this has made me feel particularly in need of a Sprite, so maybe the advert was a bit of a failure after all!