Jack Thompson’s favorite Super Bowl commercial: GTA Coke pushers!

I was watching a Reuters news report on Super Bowl commercials this year, and saw clips of what appeared to be a commercial based on the Grand Theft Auto video game series — a personal “favorite” target of Miami lawyer and anti-violence crusader Jack Thompson, who has tried his best to stop the sale of the violent game over the past years.

The ad, made by Coca-Cola, shows the GTA thug character walking through the city, and appears to be ready to commit crimes, but doesn’t.

Instead, he buys and offers people bottles of Coke. And makes the video game world a happier place to be. (insert happy smiley face here)

The clip, via YouTube is after the jump…

I am guessing the day after the Super Bowl, Thompson will call a press conference to denounce Coca-Cola’s use of the GTA genre as a platform for its product, “rewarding” GTA for its violence by giving the game this prime-time attention (positive attention, at that).

Then, I give it a week until the ad is pulled after outcry from the Bill O’Reilly types and so on.

Personally, I think it’s a very well done commercial by the Nexus agency. Kudos to them. And it’s an interesting, amusing twist on the most popular video game in America, which will be instantly recognizable by the millions that play the game.

[UPDATE: Some of the comments on Digg mention that this ad has been running in theaters during movie previews. It’s interesting that Reuters would include this in the Super Bowl story, unless it’s going to run during the Bowl pre-game, game, or post-game. Most of the time, you see advertisers keep their ads under wraps in order to surprise the public.]

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