Commercial Critique #3 – After Hours Athlete

Puma - After Hours Athlete

As much as I railed on ads that try and make you all weepy over some dumb product in my first commercial critique, this commercial really did make me all weepy over tennis shoes. I can’t tell if I like this commercial or not, but it certainly affected me. The first time I saw it on the big screen at the festival I had tears in my eyes. It makes you feel nostalgic. It’s so easy to just imagine you and your friends together, doing all the dumb things friends do in each other’s company, playing bad rounds of pool on a Saturday night in downtown Athens. I don’t usually go for that aesthetic but something about this ad makes it seem so meaningful to me.

Actually, as I’m sitting here writing this, it occurred to me that the something that makes this ad seem nostalgic is the music. Those strings laced into the deep-voiced poetry make you feel so sad, while you’re watching images of happiness flash across the screen. It’s that dichotomy between feeling sad and seeing happy that makes you nostalgic, because it’s just like the process of memory. You remember things that you can no longer experience with the sorrow of losing that experience. I have no idea what this commercial has to do with any Puma product and I can’t say I’m any more inclined to buy their stuff after having watched it. But I do get goosebumps every time I see it.

Relating to the characters in this commercial makes you feel as if you’re a character in a film. The story they’re telling is just the average story of any group of friends who go out and have a good time, yet something about the way the script is crafted makes the whole scenario seem epic. The writing for this ad won awards at Cannes as well, along with the sound. The viewers’ ability to fuse their own life story into the story that’s being told makes it seem like a story worth hearing. And this ability comes from the fact that there’s such a multitude of scenes and characters being introduced here. Every few seconds we’re glimpsing another image, perhaps one we can relate to more than the previous ones. These images glide in and out of each other – we see minor triumphs and fails in these various groups of people, and we come to know them in a very short amount of time.

This commercial is good because it’s more like a movie trailer than a traditional ad. You enjoy watching it, you’re moved emotionally, you identify with the characters. But the bottom line is that these characters are just trying to make you want to buy Puma sneakers. This isn’t a trailer; the story ends at the end of the commercial. Luckily it’s a story we all identify with, so we can feel as if we’ll continue the story after we buy our own Pumas to wear. This is the part that gets me though; if that was the strategy they were going for, it didn’t work, at least not on me. I don’t relate Pumas to making awesome memories with my friends or staying up all night wandering the city. From a creative standpoint, this film is great; from a sales standpoint, not so much. In any case, that’s definitely a pretty weepy score.