Journal of music, style and art

For the past couple decades, peddling sports drinks meant taking cues from a distinctly black, urban experience. It meant basketball and blacktops and hip hop; slam dunks, not skateboarding. But there’s been a marked shift of late, away from the hard hitting Gatorade spots you grew up with, and towards a parallel urban experience — that of the renegade, pan-ethnic millenial. Valuing creativity above all, individualist to a fault, this new target niche shuns sports franchises for more unique forms of self expression.

This framework has been adopted successfully by folks like Levi’s, Nike, Intel and now Coca Cola with their ‘Burn’ energy drink launch. The campaigns address a general malaise and popular disillusionment at a time in which confidence in how our parents did things is near nonexistent (a couple wars deep and a few trillion in the hole). Often utilizing bleak, apocalyptic imagery (think Cormac McCarthy lite), they champion the unconventional…because if it’s convention that got us here, what’s the use?

We at Say Mayday appreciate the direction things have taken. After all, in some twisted, sisyphean self-fulfilling prophecy, we are the struggling creatives looking to contribute to these, the most creative of projects…which highlight our own struggle.
Continue reading “Burn Cinema…”