So now I keep hearing about “personal branding” – the idea that your career, your mind, your body, everything that makes up the superficial “you” can be packaged up into a brand just like Coke or Mcdonalds can. That’s dead and if you haven’t planned your exit strategy yet you will have to soon enough. But then I can’t license that music, get those sexy girls, and run that ad on the Super Bowl and a thousand other places.īut no matter – let’s move past the artificially safe confines of corporate America. I can make SuperJamesCola with that formula. That’s the secret formula that’s locked in a safe in some bank in Atlanta. What they never explain is that coke zero is essentially brown-dyed water with about 16 teaspoons of fake sugar in it and add a little bit of CO2 and you make it fizz. Perhaps Coke figured out that maybe this time they had gone too far. And they are willing to use songs about drugs to help us accept those lies. But we’re willing, as a culture, to accept the lies that Coke tells us. Moving without effort, the ocean in the background.Īs they say in the song: “once again, I find myself with my friends.” Coke Zero tells me the dream is possible even though intellectually I know its a myth.įreedom isn’t found that way. Surrounded by friends and beautiful people. Whenever I watch that commercial I feel like I want a life like that: free from worry, stress, free from thinking about money or petty jealousies. She dances/roller-blades around her studly friends, her beautiful girlfriends, and it ends with everyone taking Coke Zero, the fizz going up like a group ejaculation into the sky.Ĭoke Zero – the brand where you can find your own personal ecstasy. She’s not taking Ecstasy but drinking Coke Zero. She looks like she’s on the boardwalk in Santa Monica.
In the commercial, though, there’s a girl roller-blading. There would be pretty girls, great music, and at the end of the night, total communion with nature. The original topic of the song was about how great it was to take the drug Ecstasy and go to a rave. It takes a song that was originally written by Paul Oakenfold. My favorite TV commercial is not the 1984 Apple commercial (although that’s a close number two) but a commercial for Coke Zero ( “Coke Zero Roller Girl”). The Coca-Cola company, for instance, loves the drug, Ecstasy. Personal branding, I guess, is descended from the mockery called “corporate branding”. When I hear the words “personal brand” I think “someone is going to lie to me and then try to take all of my money.” The first thing I want to deal with is the question asked me the other day, “how do you make a personal brand”. I got a death threat last week from a guy who is a senior at Brown University who didn’t think I could track him down.
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