Bucs win, but who wins advertising battle?
Gail Pennington
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The Super Bowl has officially gone
to the dogs. And baboons. And a
rogue squirrel.
With hype for the commercials
now exceeding hype for the game,
advertisers who shell out up to $2.2
million for 30 seconds of air time
covet buzz both before and after the
fact. A clever concept helps, but so
does a familiar face.
Thus, Pepsi packed Ozzy, Kelly
and Jack Osbourne, Donny and
Marie Osmond and “Brady Bunch”
mom Florence Henderson into a
sales pitch for Pepsi Twist. (The
wacky twist this time: The Os
bourne kids turn out to be the Os
mond siblings, and when Ozzy yells
for wife Sharon, he gets Carol
Brady instead.)
Tax preparers H&R Block called
on the familiar face of Willie Nel
son (and covered it with foam) in a
spot playing on his past tax prob
lems. Asked to sell shaving cream,
Nelson declines before learning he
owes the IRS billions. Then, he
lathers up.
But celebrity spots can go wrong
as easily as they go right. The mega
bucks that Gatorade spent on an ex
istential ad featuring Michael Jordan
(circa 2003) shooting hoops with his
younger self was money well spent
only if audiences are able to put one
and one together quickly enough to
recognize both Jordans (plus a third,
who appears at the end).
Likewise, Visa Check Card may
have erred in assuming most viewers
could easily identify NBA star Yao
Ming in a spot that played on confu
sion between his name (pronounced
Yow) and a clerk’s “Yo!”
But everybody can identify a ze
bra, and that’s what Anheuser
Busch counted on in rolling out the
most clever commercials of Super
Bowl XXXVII.
A-B scored big in opening the
night with a spot featuring dueling
Clydesdales. Here, while the big
horses stand impatiently, viewers
see a zebra with his head in a box.
Finally, the camera pulls back
to show that the fellow in stripes
is painstakingly viewing an
instant replay.
A later, laugh-out-loud spot had a
man dying to go into a bar for a Bud
Light but hampered by his dog and a
“no pets” policy. His solution? Put
the black, curly dog on his head and
use a Jamaican accent, mon.
Pepsi also put out a casting call
in the animal kingdom, and found
the Jack Nicholson of baboons for a
Sierra Mist spot in which the clever
ape builds a catapult to bounce him
into the polar bear pool on a
steamy day.
Another funny Sierra Mist spot
featured a dog that lifts its leg to
open a fire hydrant and give himself
and his master a cooling shower.
The squirrel came from Trident,
explaining its old sales pitch assert
ing that “four out of five dentists rec
ommend sugarless gum for their pa
tients who chew gum.” Why not the
fifth dentist? The spot suggests that
a squirrel ran up his pants leg at an
inopportune moment, causing him
to shriek, “Oh, no!”
Bison aren’t cute; maybe that’s
why Levi’s flopped with a stylish but
vague pitch for Type 1 jeans featur
ing a bison stampede toward a city
and past young people clad in his
toric (yet contemporary) denim.
And not all spots featuring hu
mans were disappointing. Quizno’s
scored in introducing its leader,
“Chef Jimmy” (real-life founder Jim
my Lambatos), who is so obsessed
with perfecting toasted sandwiches
that he sometimes forgets other
things. Such as his pants.
FedEx had a funny (if somewhat
dated) takeoff on the movie “Cast
away” in which a Tom Hanks-type
delivers a package after years strand
ed on an island. Turns out the box
holds a mobile phone, GPS locator
and other useful tools.
And speaking of islands, how
about Gilligan and his pals turning
up for AT&T Wireless? The spot, us
ing computers to merge scenes from
the TV series with new footage, en
visions what would have happened if
Gilligan had come equipped with an
“m-life.” (In short, “Gilligan’s Island”
would have begun and ended on the
same day.)
After last year’s post-Sept. 11 shift
to a patriotic, touching tone for Su
per Bowl commercials, humor was
back in a big way this year. An
heuser-Busch was particularly big on
laughs, as in a spot in which an up
side-down clown drinks a beer
through what seems to be the wrong
orifice. (The punch line: He tries to
order a hot dog.)
Ads from the Office of National
Drug Control Policy were among the
few to shift the mood. In one, a man
on a subway is confronted by people
who accuse him of murdering them
with the money he spent for drugs;
in another, a young teen is pregnant,
victim of impaired judgment caused
by marijuana.
© 2003, St Louis Post-Dispatch,
distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune
Information Services.
Marine
continued from page 1A
shell be at Camp Pendleton, where
she’ll be deployed for duty, or how
long she’ll have to stay before she
gets to go home. Her exercise and
sports science major will remain un
finished; once she returns, Sanchez
hopes to get her bachelor’s degree
within five terms and then head to
Oregon Health & Science Universi
ty or Portland State University for a
physician’s assistant program.
“There’s a lot of things that are
up in the air,” she said. “Most of us
are just looking at this as ‘OK, let us
go, let us do our job and get us back
home. Well pick up our lives when
we come back.”
Meanwhile, Sanchez’s family is
picking up after her. Her mother
and stepfather, Marilyn and Terry
Lorance, spent Saturday cleaning
out the OSU student’s apartment;
after all, they don’t know how long
she’ll be in the field.
“It’s an interesting thing to be a
parent or the spouse of a reserve,”
Marilyn Lorance said, “because
people who are reservists have jobs
and lives and homes that are not
focused on the military. So when
they are called into active duty,
those parts of their lives have got to
be put on hold.”
Lorance said her daughter was
only given three days’ notice before
she had to report to the marine re
serves in Eugene.
“There are incredible demands
placed on family members of the re
servists to take care of the other
pieces of their lives for them,” she
said. “We have to trust her to go
there and do her job and come home
safely, and she has to trust us to take
care of the rest of her life so she has
something to come back to.”
As a female engineer in an all
male platoon, Sanchez is something
of an anomaly. She’s spent her past
two years in the reserves getting
used to being one of the very few
among the few and the proud.
“The way I see ifrfor females, if
you’re doing your job correctly,
there will be very little differences,”
Sanchez said. “To the majority of
the guys in my platoon and in the
company, I’m just another marine.
I go there, I do my job, I pull my
weight, I carry my own pack.”
She acknowledged that there are
plenty of difficulties. Sanchez par
ticipates in combat exercises but
has a separate area to shower. She
spends all day tiring herself with
drills and procedures but has to
sleep in a completely separate area
from her fellow marines. She knows
how to fire a rifle but isn’t ever al
lowed to be on the front lines. And
she’s always having to buck the
stereotypes that some people have
with females in the military.
“There are other girls who give it
a bad name,” she said. “They ei
ther sleep around or get flirty and
have the guys carry their pack for
them or whatever. But (the guys)
aren’t going to respect that.
“My goal personally is to not
have them look at me and say,
‘There’s the female.’ Instead, it’s to
say, ‘There goes another marine.”
Sanchez seems almost anxious
to fight terrorism somewhere —
anywhere, if it will keep her coun
try safe.
“Think back to how you felt dur
ing Sept. 11,” Sanchez said. “If I
can have a part in stopping that
from ever happening again, you bet
I’ll be there. Even if they want me
back in the rear, cleaning tools ...
it’s the right place for me to be.
“None of us wants to go into
combat; it’s an ugly thing. None of
us are saying, ‘Yippee, let’s get
"I'm just another
marine. I go there,
I do my job, I pull
my own weight,
I carry my own pack/'
Christine Sanchez
Marine corporal
into a gunfight.’ It’s something no
body wants, but sometimes you
have to do it because you have
the other side who isn’t giving you
another option, no matter how
hard you’ve tried.”
She added that no matter what
faults President George W. Bush
may have, she’s glad that he’s made
a decision to fight terrorism and is
sticking with it.
Bush has “got the guts to call
right right and wrong wrong and
say you don’t get away with this
kind of behavior,” she said.
Lorance agreed. While she natu
rally worries about her daughter’s
safety, she said there are higher
powers at work.
“We’re pretty much at peace be
cause she’s in the Lord’s hands, no
matter where she is,” Lorance said.
She added that she thinks Sanchez
is doing the right thing.
“I think back to what happened
prior to World War II when Neville
Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of
Great Britain, thought that appeas
ing and talking reason and giving
into pressure a little bit then and
there would forestall a war — be
cause certainly (the other side)
would see common sense,” she said.
“But I think it’s naive to think that
somebody who has no history of
compassion or common sense or
reason would all of a sudden see
what we would call reason. That past
has not worked historically, and
Scott Abts Emerald
Christine Sanchez marches in the Springfield holiday parade in December2002
some things are worth fighting for.”
Steve Arntt, a Portland-based
lawyer and one of Sanchez’s close
friends, said he also supports her
commitment to doing what she
feels is right.
“She has a tremendous amount
of determination, great worth ethic
and tremendous loyalty,” said
Arntt, a captain in the Oregon Na
tional Guard who has not been
called into active duty thus far.
He added that the situation is a
bit strange.
“It’s kind of odd. In 13 years, I
haven’t been deployed to a for
ward area, and here’s someone
who’s been around for a compara
tively short time, and that just
goes to show in a lot of ways it’s
just about timing.”
Sanchez said she knows things
will be different when she returns
to Oregon.
“One saying we have is Semper
Gumby — we’re always flexible be
cause everything changes and we
have to roll with the punches,” she
said. “I know when I come back
things will be different. But every
thing has a price. I would have paid
a price if I hadn’t done this because I
would have been sitting back, think
ing, ‘There’s something I should be
doing here to support my country.’”
Contact the news editor
atbrookreinhard@dailyemerald.com.
To place an ad,
call (541) 3464343 or
stop by Room 300
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