Forever Disaster

Did you know that Adidas is an acronym of All Day I Dream About Sport? No? Good, 'cause it's just an urban myth. It's actually a contraction of the founder's name, Adolf "Adi" Dassler.  Well his brother, Rudolf didn't get along with him, and left to start his own company, Puma.  How about that?  You have a successful multinational shoe company, and it's only the second biggest  multinational shoe company in the family.

So it's fitting that Puma has always been the poor cousin to the big boys of sports footwear. The only organized sports I ever participated in - playing soccer as a child - was in Puma shoes. So when I was entering my teens, at about the time the marketing Svengalis at Nike convinced everyone in my generation that shoes were the determiner of athletic prowess and social status. Here I was, the closest connection I had to this suddenly important world of shoes was through the ones cheap enough to be sold at Zellers, the Autobots to Nike's Transformers.

But now Puma is going to try constructing a bad-ass image for itself with a new ad campaign. And someone in PR decided they'd do it with athletes in hot-tubs.  In their trying-too-hard ad, you probably recognized Usain Bolt.  If you follow soccer, you recognized Mario Balotelli and possibly Marta.  And I had to look it up, and the woman who is about to take a two-stroke penalty for taking the putter in the tub with her is Lexi Thompson.  And I don't know why they have footage of Formula 1 pit stop either.

The whole thing seems like a miscalculation, even before you find out that Thompson is only 19.  Like I say, its attempt to look rebellious is really over the top.  But it's also not really believable from mostly likeable athletes. Yes, Balotelli has enough sinisterness for all of them, but that leads to the biggest problem.  The scene of him in the hot-tub is the creepiest thing I've ever seen.  There he is, with a hint of a grin of self satisfaction, with his arms around a couple of early-round-losers from a Taylor Swift impersonation contest, speaking for him in bubbly voices with Borg-like unison.  Yes, I know it was probably just something they threw together when the ad's director discovered he can't speak English, but now I'm going to go out and buy some Adidas shoes just so everyone knows I'm not involved with this.