Three New Commercials = “Bike Pod” Goodness!

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Smack dab in the middle of watching some Friday evening tv programming on ABC came the most pleasant of surprises: three consecutive commercials showcasing bicycling and they're all pretty nice spots.

First came this brand new, wonderfully creative ad from VerizonWireless featuring the Droid Razr. I'm not gonna spoil the end of it, but we get to spend thirty seconds with a young man energetically zipping up and down the hills of San Francisco on his bike just to do something cute for his girl. It's got some great editing, watch it:


Nice to see cycling in a positive and fun light. I did some research and actually located the Verizon casting call on Cyclelicious, which was up only a month ago.

But I also knew I'd seen this glyph-on-a-map-app stunt done in the bike world before so I went hunting and found a bike ride celebrating the SF Giants making it to the World Series that could have been the inspiration. Whether Verizon "stole" the idea or not, I heartedly endorse more commercials like this.

The next biking spot up I'd seen before, but it's still relatively new to the airwaves. Quaker Up put together this inspirational spot featuring a kid using the energy of his morning meal to power up the top of a hill. The kid can sure dream, but bicycling is certainly becoming the cool thing to show as healthy and fun.

And finally returning to the Bay Area, the third spot was actually a promo for ABC's new series "Red Widow" which even after visiting the Wiki page, I'm not quite certain what the show is all about. However, the 60 second teaser is beautifully moody and features a half dozen shots of the female lead (Rhada Mitchell) on her bike.  Unfortunately, that shorter spot isn't available on-line, so you'll have to settle for this 2 1/2 minute preview which does start off with some bicycling in the first 20 seconds.

I encourage you to find the better spot currently running in heavy promotion on ABC.

I'll keep writing this stuff as I see it and I see a lot more of it these days. That's a good thing.