The salmon makes all the difference...

I absolutely love the audacity of the new ads for Dasani water... have you seen them? If not, go to their website right now, and then come back. Just click first on “TV ads”, and then on the picture of the guy in a bear suit holding a fish.

Here’s the URL:

http://www.dasani.com/flash.htm

This ad has been running quite frequently around here lately, and it amuses me to no end.

So did you check it out?

Yup, that’s right... here’s a company selling bottled water that has the utter chutzpah to base their campaign around the fact that they AREN’T filling their bottles with fresh, natural, clear water from a river or spring…

In fact, they go so far as to imply that natural water is a bad, bad thing, closing their spots with the unique tagline:

"Dasani... It's crisp, refreshing, and salmon-free"

After all, who’d want water from a mountain spring or free flowing river? That’s where fish spawn, for christ’s sake!

(now granted, I wouldn’t want to drink anything taken from the Jacuzzi used in Ron Jeremy’s production of “Finding Nympho” but I think this is a little different...)

Before you think I have no sense of humor, trust me, I realize that this ad has its tongue planted firmly in cheek, and it’s meant to be funny and memorable, but still… you know that under the surface is a message that’s very important to their marketing… and when you get down to it, they really ARE saying that their water is purer (purer? more pure? Containing a greater quantity of the essence of pure? Whatever... you get the drift). They really want you to believe that natural water is bad, and you should only drink water that undergoes their top-secret special “filtering” process…

That’s quite a leap to make... and here’s what makes it even more amazing...

Recently, 500,000 bottles of Dasani water had to be recalled in Britain, due to the fact that they contained illegally high levels of bromate - a cancer-causing chemical.

Oops… guess you can’t blame that on salmon semen.

UK paper The Guardian also had this to add:

"Coca-Cola's new brand of "pure" bottled water, Dasani, was revealed earlier this month to be tap water taken from the mains. Then, it emerged that what the firm described as its "highly sophisticated purification process", based on NASA spacecraft technology, was in fact reverse osmosis used in many modest domestic water purification units."

To which executives at Coca-Cola replied:

“Yeah, but we put it in a really cool bottle... it has swirlies and everything!”

So basically, Dasani is nothing more than tap water... or actually, it’s tap water, “with an extra special heaping of bromate (chemotherapy sold separately).”

Just kind of makes you want to find a guy in a bear suit and smack him with a fish, doesn’t it?



...but the ad is kinda funny.