Why Not?
By Glue Society
The brief on this was a strange beast. Basically, RC Cola was after a spot that worked in many different markets around the world. So the whole thing needed to work without dialogue and costly lip sync dubbing.
That meant that as well as direct, we helped collaborate on writing these scripts. Bringing them down from the original, which featured a cast of hundreds, to something more achievable.
Because the line ‘Why Not?’ was all about trying new things, we took some of the greatest inventions of all history – and placed RC Cola at the centre of these world-shifting moments. In this case, the Invention of Fire, Formation of the Pyramids, Creation of the Internet, and of course, Pairing Socks with Sandals.
The ad itself is totally irreverent. But there’s a reverence to the craft and the pop culture references within it. We’re in a world where knowledge of popular culture is a language. And we used it as a universal language – to transcend countries and borders. We kind of bounce along to a lot of different places with a bit of Looney Tunes energy. Kind of like filmic genre-hopping.
There’s actually a lot of my childhood in this ad. In terms of movie references from growing up renting obscure VHS tapes from the local video store. But also just in terms of bringing some of the silliness in my mind to life. Sometimes advertising feels like very serious business. But I like the idea that sometimes, just sometimes, advertising can (and should) be a bit of bonkers nonsense to sell some cola.
As told by Luke Nuto
To keep that ‘history of movies’ feel, we wanted to shoot everything in camera. There was a bit of post cleanup removing the green-suited puppeteers – but beyond that, everything you see there was done for real. Even the Pyramid and UFO we shot as a miniature to get the deliberately hokey look of 50’s sci-fi.
We were tasked with introducing a new character mascot for the brand. I think at one point the client was asking for a CGI talking ice-cube (not the rapper). But we wanted to take them somewhere more unconventional.
Like many, I grew up on Jim Henson puppets infiltrating culture. Muppets and such were obviously great, but I always gravitated toward the stranger creatures like Hans the Hedgehog from Henson’s The Storyteller. So that’s what we wanted to do here. Something real weird that just felt a bit wrong in all the right ways.
Richard Strauss’s ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’ (perhaps better known as the 2001 Space Odyssey theme tune) seemed like an appropriate way to convey the scale of these moments of invention, while highlighting the silliness that a deranged rabbit-dog creature drinking cola was somehow also involved.
