Mission Mission

These Diet Coke ads have recently popped up around town.

Wow. An agency got Diet Coke to buy advertising on 1 of the 3 public telephones in the Mission. pic.twitter.com/99yGx7PeB2

— Mai Le (@mai) February 25, 2014

@mai @eviloars @kevinmonty pic.twitter.com/89H9Rc9vJK

— Paolo Sambrano (@paolo) February 26, 2014

New ads on pay phones seem to mock . . . something. But maybe the tone is what you bring to it. Maybe they’re meaning to celebrate a lifestyle or demographic that they’ve identified on some fancy charts as primed for targeting.

You’re in San Francisco, you took some crazy risks, the whole world is in your hands, put the world down for a moment and pick up a can of soda.

Or maybe they’re trying to get us to write and talk about it. So here we are. In that vein, I’d like to remind you that drinking Diet Coke is probably horrible for your body. You’d be better off drinking a glass of water. Also, water isn’t specifically messing with my head to get me to write all this right now.

We Built This City wondered if they were real, “I’d say that I hope these ads are a joke or art piece, but they probably aren’t. I mean, seriously? Seriously?”

If they are real, and not just a new effort from the BLF, I’m kind of baffled by what they mean. You could swap out their brand with anything else, nothing about it seems to imply that you need Diet Coke, but I guess that’s just lifestyle advertising.