The World Cup in Ads

Now that the World Cup is over, we can go back to spelling football the right way, and forget about FIFA for another four years. But for some of us, the commercials were just as interesting as the penalty kicks. The big bucks spent by sponsors and the fact that Latinos love soccer made it, well,  the Super Bowl of Spanish-language advertising,

Univision carried the games in Spanish and ratings went through the roof. Its knowledgeable, often politically incorrect announcers, helped by the fact that several Latin American teams made the finals, were infinitely preferrable to the snarky, Eurotrash commentators elsewhere, even if you didn’t speak Spanish.

In the television ads, several themes predominated, especially the trope of rabid, soccer-mad Hispanics. Among the most pretentious examples was a Budweiser campaign called “Rise as One.” It was shot in black and white to a retro soundtrack and showed crowds marching in the streets, evoking revolution in sweaty banana republics. Perhaps the hope was that these guerilla fans would quench their thirst with the “Official Beer of the World Cup.”

 Another clunker came from State Farm, which portrayed klutzy fans leaping about their living room, trashing furniture, windows, plates, each other.  The one solace of this whimsical, yet potentially deadly universe is that everything is covered by a State Farm insurance policy.

A much better example, and one of my favorites, came from Hyundai. It begins in a maternity ward somewhere in Latin America, deluged with new arrivals. “What happened nine months ago?” asks a weary nurse. Cut to that familiar Univision announcer yelling “Gooool!’ and a couple falling into each other’s arms to celebrate their team’s victory. Very clever, and much more fun than marching in the street.

Bacardi continued its revisionist stroll through Cuban history. Their ad showed a man, perhaps one of the several hundred Bacardi heirs living the high life between Miami and Madrid, walking through a putative Havana (most likely Old San Juan.) The voice over explains that Bacardi thrived despite Prohibition, the Cuban Revolution and quien sabe que mas. Of course, Bacardi is now a vast multinational based in Bermuda, and hasn’t had anything to do with Cuba for half a century, and it’s been a few generations since a Bacardi actively ran the company. But why quibble over facts?

A more troubling meme in several campaigns touched upon income inequality. While Brazil’s brand new stadiums were impressive, only a few blocks away were grim, dangerous shantytowns called favelas with no electricity. Much was made of the notion that everyone around the world could enjoy the World Cup, except perhaps the inhabitants of these  favelas.

One ad showed a group of young men playing soccer at dusk. The setting was a generic Latin American city, with one such slum in the background. As it grows dark, they convince someone to turn the lights on. Suddenly the makeshift soccer field is illuminated, and we see that---ta-da!---it’s actually the lights of a McDonalds.

These muchachos may enjoy the benefits of  globalism, whether streetlights or a Big Mac, but not for long.

If anything, the World Cup stands for big bucks and big media, so it’s difficult to whitewash it with diversity and inclusion. Yet Coca-Cola’s ad described a peculiar program in which company representatives visited some dicey-looking places (Sudan? Honduras?) and offered multicultural teams of young soccer players what appeared to be an all-expense paid trip to Brazil, like a sort of third world Make a Wish Foundation. Did Coke actually do this? Who knows? But the truth remains that when it was over, the kids were sent home.

And like us, all they had to remember the World Cup was a few crummy commercials.

By Eric Garcia