Journal 3.
One Coke Away From Each Other - Real Magic (Extended Version)

Okay, so this one might be taking the prompt a little bit too literally, but I couldn’t help myself.

In this advertisement for Coca-Cola, we arrive in a massive arena full of screaming people. You can tell that it’s a major sporting event and that it’s also being televised. We see sports commentators and PC video game players who are boys around 13-15 years old. The commercial itself is very exciting and intense. You can tell this is serious because the players are focused and efficient. The crowd is still going wild. We are hurled into a war of a magical world through the screen. On one side we see an array of mythical creatures, and on the other, we see seemingly human knights. One player becomes the focus from this point on when an ogre is hit and wounded. This alerts the arena and people start going nuts. The player in real life turns around in his moment of peril and grabs a coke. Magically, after his sip, the ogre is shown having an epiphany of peace after manifesting flashbacks of his wife and child. He drops his weapon to the astonishment of the arena. We also find out at this moment that the game is being streamed to platforms across the world. It starts to pull on the heartstrings when we are shown the vast emotion that this change in context is creating amongst people everywhere. It seems like this ad takes place in a future world because this is international news. A cease-fire is called on the mythical battleground and peace is restored across the land. We are shown people in the physical world reacting in common places on cell phones, restaurant TVs, home televisions, etc… where people are smiling and feeling happy for the mythical land acquiring peace. The commercial wraps the cinematic experience with the ogre looking into the camera where we are given the phrase “We are one coke away”, only to be followed by a frame of the boy player holding his coke bottle displaying the quote “from each other”. This commercial sells the magic almost quite literally by adhering to our deep human need for peace and unity (especially being that this is aired in 2021, after the worldwide pandemic).