During yesterday’s Hawks-Niners match-up, Dr. Dre’s headphone company ran a particularly timely spot showing Colin Kaepernick arriving at an opponent’s stadium to vicious boos and nasty rain (see the ad above).
It was Seattle. Nothing said Seattle. Or Seahawks. But it was Seattle.
Now Seattle wants to boycott the headphones.
“They obviously don’t know what it means to be a 12th man. There is NO way a true Seahawk fan would act that way. No beats headphones for me,” reads a typical comment on the ad, found at KJR’s website.
The idea of the ad is to show that the headphones can cancel out even the loudest sounds. That would seem to feed into Seattle’s mythos of being the loudest fans in the NFL.
However, the ad goes overboard when it shows green-garbed Kaepernick haters throwing garbage at his bus, and then a full cooler. At 0:52 there may be a guy peeing on the bus.
Cue Seattle outrage.
“This is just bad business ethic. They could have shown him flying to an away game with a crying baby on the plane but instead they depicted a violent fan base of an opposing team. Not cool that they chose the colors as blue and green. NOBODY thinks this is coincidence,” reads another comment at KJR.
And the ad was unrealistic in another way: While Kaepernick has a lot of things to be proud of during his short career, tuning out Seattle’s fans isn’t one of them: He’s played terribly here in the exact rainy weather depicted in the ad. He’s just lucky his team squeaked out a win on his home turf, or this tacky ad would have been simply embarrassing.