Rachel Allen
rallen19@uwyo.edu
By now, I’m sure that everyone reading this has heard about the puppy monkey baby commercial that played during Super Bowl 50. I didn’t even watch the Super Bowl and I know about it. That being said, the puppy monkey baby commercial is a terrifying and confusing advertisement for the Mountain Dew Kickstart energy drink. The ad depicts a pug/monkey/baby hybrid serving Kickstarts to three guys watching TV. The hybrid continuously says “Puppy monkey baby” as if it were some kind of weird Pokemon. The commercial ends by making the point that, like the puppy monkey baby, Kickstart is a combination of three great things: Mountain Dew, juice, and caffeine.
The commercial itself might be scary, weird and doesn’t make sense until the very end, but as far as marketing strategy goes, it’s genius. Like I said, the pieces don’t fall into place until the very end, which is why I think that this is a trademark of good suspense movies. A good director can leave their audience completely clueless and pull together everything in the last few minutes. The puppy monkey baby commercial is a great example. Viewers of the Super Bowl saw the weird creature, the guys watching TV and the Mountain Dew cans, but it doesn’t come together until the closing line. Doing this forces the viewer to watch the whole commercial to see exactly how the puppy monkey baby ties into the advertisement, granting Kickstart more exposure.
Another element that made puppy monkey baby so effective was how totally bizarre it was. The hybrid- a failed science experiment with a pug head, a monkey torso, and baby legs- is so strange and exotic that it captures audience attention and keeps it. It’s like a car wreck—you simply can’t look away. It looks like it belongs in a circus or a museum, an exhibit on mutation and the harmful effects of radiation poisoning or one of those “Has science gone too far?” tabloids. The sheer weirdness burns itself into the viewer’s memory and stays there.
The effect this has is one of extended advertisement well outside the Super Bowl. Even after the game had ended, people continued to buzz about the bizarre Kickstart commercial (or at least the people that weren’t actually talking about the game itself). The following Monday, the one thing I heard the most from classmates was, “did you see the puppy monkey baby commercial?” Confirmation resulted in a discussion of reactions. Denial led to more confusion and those who hadn’t seen it looked it up when they got home. This led to even more advertisement. The advertisement went up on YouTube on Feb. 3rd and currently has 19 million views.
The puppy monkey baby might be haunting the dreams of small children but there’s no denying that it gained Mountain Dew a Titanic-sized boatload of exposure. It even gained news coverage in the Huffington Post. The YouTube views (19 million!) don’t even count the number of people who watched the commercial when it aired during the Bowl.
The real question is, does it make me want to go out and buy a Kickstart right now?
…Maybe just a little.
