I'd Buy That

Anyone who's watched the Super Bowl - and who hasn't? -- knows the office of advertising. People, millions of them, look ahead to the commercials as often as the football game itself. If the ad succeeds, they win big. If they fail, well, they even get talked about.

It isn't that way with every PR campaign.

In his sermon today, our pastor threw out some ad slogans to see if we recognised them.

The ones we didn't had been "failures" for brands that still do good for themselves (KFC and Coke). But I felt the force of advertising when I heard "Where's the kick?" and without hesitation knew, 25 days later that effort had ended, that it was for Wendy's.

The motion for us in the faithful was how are we promoting, marketing and carrying God's message? His story? Based on my "campaign," would a person recognize me as a Christian now and, hopefully, 25 years from now?

It gave us enough to remember about, that's for sure. And, not surprisingly, the case came up again later.

This afternoon, because it was a comparatively quick and sunny day, Carter and I decided to go on another can-collecting mission. There were some ditches on my run yesterday that I noticed had cans littered in them.

So we walked in the sunshine, picking up a few soda cans but mainly beer cans. Cheap beer and old school beer. I knew some people still drank Pabst Blue Ribbon, but Hamm's? I did not even know they even made that!

I picked up the can and naturally couldn't help but beginning to talk the old theme song from the commercials. C'mon, you love it, too... From the state of sky-blue waters...

Well I got a big eye roll from Carter. "Mom, how could you even recognize that?" I tried to explain that I was likely his age or younger when the commercials were on, but they had a cartoon bear and, as a kid, you really weren't thinking it was a beer commercial. Just more of a, well, bear commercial.

We truly can't deny the king of advertising, can we?

The wonder we want to ask ourselves, though, is are we sending the powerful message?