Mr. Pop-Culture's Penguins

I'm not sure how we got to the point where two different Canadian companies are using penguins in their ads. But here we are watching CIBC and People's Jewellers alternately sending flightless avians to sell goods and services.

The CIBC penguin began with an ad that seemed like a one-off, using that flightlessness to sell its flight rewards program. That was cute, so they wrote in an entire family for him, and now the penguin is selling all kinds of banking services that don't seem to have any connection to his species.

Here's a fun fact: the female penguin has pink around her eyes, which you might assume is an outdated way of indicating her gender without stuffing her into a dress. But these are Magellanic Penguins, and they do have a pink spot around the eyes where there are no feathers. That's apparently not related to gender, but at least the ads are more accurate than you would think.

People's (or Kay in the states) is taking a different approach, showing penguins in a more natural habitat, and making reference to the fact that male penguins sometimes impress a mate by offering a pebble. This really shows how advertisers are quite different from other people. Most of us hear about that beautifully simple practice among a beloved animal, and find it heartwarming to feel a connection with a living thing so different and far away. Ad makers say, hey, let's make fun of those silly birds.

It doesn't help that it has a cheesy english accent narrator. You'd think they would have had a Morgan Freeman impersonator to reference March of the Penguins. Maybe they were trying for a David Attenborough sound; if so, it didn't really work. It just sounds like the generic slightly silly pompous english accent used to indicate stuffy authority.

Sadly - though not surprisingly - the pebble story is not really true. Male penguins do present pebbles to their mates, but it's not a proposal; it's just to help build the nest, which is made of pebbles. There's no attempt to impress the mate with a particularly nice pebble. And that leads to the ultimate irony of the ad: We're supposed to look down on these uncivilized animals for trying to get a mate with a particularly nice rock. And the ad is using this to sell diamonds, which themselves are just really shiny rocks. That's silly to begin with, but it turns out that unlike us, the penguins' rocks have a purpose, while we've created a huge global infrastructure just to get at the shiniest rocks on the planet.