Pepsi Cola will have a Sign Language Ad during the Super Bowl Game

Check this out!

Only deaf people will get this Super Bowl ad
Pepsi Co’s pre-game advertisement features a joke that originates from
the deaf community and will play out on screen over 60 seconds of total

silence.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22824530/from/ET/

I’ve pasted in the story here:

updated 11:29 a.m. MT, Thurs., Jan. 24, 2008

NEW YORK – Amid the wall-to-wall sound during next Sunday’s Super Bowl,

one commercial from PepsiCo could send some viewers grabbing for their
remotes to check whether they’d accidentally hit the mute button.

The pre-game advertisement features a joke that originates from the
deaf
community and will play out on screen over 60 seconds of total silence,

a veritable eternity when it comes to the noisiness of Super Bowl ads.

“It’s a popular story and we just turned it into an advertisement,”
said
Clay Broussard, a supply and logistics manager at PepsiCo who proposed
the idea for the ad. “This is the PepsiCo flavor of that joke.”

The joke goes like this: Two guys are driving to their friend Bob’s
house to watch the Super Bowl. Once they get to Bob’s street, neither
knows which house is his. They sit in the car, arguing, until one of
them has an idea. He starts laying on the horn, and one by one, the
houses light up and dogs start barking.

One house stays dark and quiet: It’s Bob’s.

Deaf people will be falling out of their chairs in disbelief, National
Association of the Deaf president Bobbie Beth Scoggins wrote in an
e-mail response to questions. Hearing people, Scoggins wrote, will stop

what they’re doing to see why there are no sounds. She believes it’s an

historic first for an ad featuring American Sign Language to get such
prominent play.

“I was glad to see this part of deaf culture awareness shared in a most

clever way,” Scoggins, who is deaf, wrote by e-mail as she was
traveling.

Broussard, who plays Bob in the commercial, has worked for PepsiCo in Dallas for 27 years. He got involved in the deaf community through a
church he and his wife attended, where the services were conducted
entirely in sign language. Broussard is not deaf.

The two actors who play Bob’s friends – Brian Dowling and Darren
Therriault – are also PepsiCo employees, and are deaf. Dowling works
for Frito-Lay  in Arizona, and Therriault works for PepsiCo in Chicago.

Broussard worked on the ad concept on his own time. He said, “This was
all extra credit.”

It was 18 months before he showed it to senior managers, who decided
they wanted it for the Super Bowl.

The ad was directed by Baker Smith, with creative help from BBDO-NY. A PepsiCo spokeswoman declined to say how much the ad cost.