Picket Fence Post

In between enjoying fun and inspiring Olympic moments with the Picket Fence Post family during the past two weeks, I’ve felt emotionally beseiged (or manipulated I should say) by the commercials. What was there an armada of Don Drapers working overtime on ads for the Olympics?

You know the ads of which I speak. Those three-hankie ones. The ones that made you tear up in the first frame because you knew what was coming next.

Procter & Gamble is largely responsible for all of this, with its line of “Thank You Mom” ads made just for the Olympics. Nearly every one of them got to me, mostly the one below, because it uses footage from real mothers whose adult children competed in the 2010 winter Olympics. Loved the last mom mouthing the words, “That’s my baby!”

Then there was this ad, where women watched their children compete in the Olympics, only the athletes aren’t adults, they’re little children:

The only P&G-mom ad that I saw which leavened the tears with humor was this “Never Walk Alone” ad where moms were depicted in various points of motherhood: Holding a newborn in the delivery room, vacuuming the living room with a baby on a hip, changing a flat tire with the kids on the side of the road, dragging a kid’s hockey stuff out of the house in the dead of winter, picking a kid up from the principal’s office. However whenever I think about the Canadian figure skater whose biggest fan, her mother, died a few days before she was set to take the ice and then watched this ad . . .

Finally, here’s the last of the insidiously moving TV advertisements that I saw during the Olympics, the retooled ad for Coke with that haunting Sia song playing in the background:

Did you find yourself riveted to these ads too?