Coca Cola advertisement with Jack White song "leaked"

Last August, we reported on the rumor of White Stripes' Jack White to write and sing a song for Coca Cola. NME reports today that the commercial has "leaked" to the web.

"But to be asked to write something particular along one theme of love in a worldwide form that I'm not really used to appealed to me. I've written a song and I wrote it really quickly and it's an interesting commercial that's been made. I was inspired by the commercial."


seen here in the commercial archive

Knowing Crispin Mother London and their keen sense of viral, it's hard to believe that they didn't intentionally leak this to youtube.
Directed by: Nagi Noda (hat tip thespunker)

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caffeinegoddess's picture

Ah. Funny, when I tried searching for who dunnit...that article didn't come up...nothing did. :/ (Stupid google) ;)

caffeinegoddess's picture

Shots has a bit more on the spot.

Was shot while while Noda was with Nexus (is now at Partizan).

The shoot, which took place in February last year, took five days and was, claims Mother creative Kim Gehring, one of the largest undertaken in South Africa, with over 250 extras roped in to play the various multiplied versions of each character. Since then various complications with music licensing and technical difficulties have delayed its release. Initially Gehring wanted to take the technique on from that in Sentimental Journey, but on the day the ambitious shoot was made impossible after the motion control gig broke down, so they reverted to the original method. The spot broke on MTV in Australia this week, and is set to be the centrepiece of Coca-Cola's global campaign for this summer.

"I saw the Yuki video about three years ago and loved it," Gehring told shots.net. "I really wanted to use do it and then this Coke job came up. They wanted something iconic, so we started writing very simple fables and childlike stories based on the idea of what goes around comes around. I called Nagi and she agreed to do the job, so we flew her over here to work on the project, helping to write scripts and ideas."

AnonymousCoward's picture

I've only seen "pink" as of yet and it was fucking awesome.

Dabitch's picture

Not all clients, thankfully. But yes, it's terribly common. Sad.
For an example of the opposite, see adiddas new adicolor films. :)

AnonymousCoward's picture

jeepers, so that means clients will always be behind the times b/c instead of okaying the innovation and ideas they just rubberstamp the singular execution?

caffeinegoddess's picture

Visually it makes me think of Target ads and the weird Japanese Ronald transformations from 2004. But that's prolly just me. ;D

Dabitch's picture

"Now"? Dude, that's the way it's always been, directors prove their big ideas in music videos, and once they're realised clients "get it" and dare to hire the director to do the same again.
Also known as "demo love" when things end up looking exactly the same. ;)

AnonymousCoward's picture

uh and here's the link to said video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFjIn3Uhwyw

AnonymousCoward's picture

Also check out this other video Nagi made, very similar. Guess the big fad in advertising now is to cull their ideas from music videos.

Dabitch's picture

That's an awesome looking ad despite youtube's pxellated jumpy look. ;) I wonder who directed, and how it was made.

Jack saying that the commercial inspired him implies that the ad was made befor ethe song. Unusual tactic.

AnonymousCoward's picture

The spot is by Mother, London, not CP&B. The director is Nagi Noda, not Michel Gondry. (source: http://www.boardsmag.com/articles/magazine/20060101/cry.html)

troymcclure's picture

I agree that this is some tasty eye candy. No doubt it will be the next Internet sensation. But take away the trick photography and the soundtrack by Jack White and what's left? As Gertrude Stein (or was it Alice B. Toklas?) famously said of Oakland, "There's no there there." Whoever created this commercial seems to have mistaken a cool technique for an actual idea. Contrast that with, say, Honda's "Cog" or "Grr" commercials. They were visually arresting to be sure. But there was a message to the madness, a perfect fusion of style and substance. (To be fair, though, how much can you really say about soda?)

AnonymousCoward's picture

actually, not particularly unusual... in my experience with making music for commercials (I've done well over 100 of them) the picture is nearly completed by the time they involve the music.

Most of the time, the picture will still go through several edits and/or tweeks during this period, but the percentage of times that the music is written before the picture is created is very small (not counting the commercials where there is on-camera singing).

LPikon's picture

Woops - I hate it when people spell my name wrong, so my apologies to Michel (or Michael) Gondry (not Gondrey)!

LPikon's picture

This looks very much like a typical (and brilliant) Michael Gondrey directorial style.
This makes a lot of sense because Gondrey is not only a brilliant director, but has also made at least 4 of the previous White Stripes (also brilliant) music videos that I'm aware of.

AnonymousCoward's picture

Few years ago I saw an amazing Japanese video clip that used the same concept - I was trying to find it but could not remember the name of the artist or the director. I am sure the creators of this ad spend lots of time watching that video clip...

Robblink's picture

I like this ad a lot. Very different from what Coke has been doing for the last couple of years.