Assignment #4: Designing an advertisement

This isn't really that important of a document, but the story behind it was an important one for me.  The teacher had told us to take an existing product and write a commercial for it, and a crucial question for me was whether it was to be turned in or presented aloud.  When he assigned it, he assured us it was just to be turned in.  So I wrote this.  Then, on the day it was due, he changed his mind and decided to make everyone get up and read theirs aloud.  I have no problem with speaking in front of people, but I'd like just a little advance warning please.  Then I had to decide: do I read it as is, to an audience that it wasn't written for, or do I scramble to rewrite it for the class?  I decided to go with the former.

My copy doesn't have a grade on it--it was probably another one of those "100% if you did it" kind of things.  We seemed to get a lot of those in high school.

I chose the soft drink Fresca, which I loved for a long time.  At the moment I'm out of that phase.

"Thirsty?  Drink Fresca.  Or else.  Because we're watching you.  And if, the next time you go to the store, you don't buy Fresca, we're going to know.  We'll analyze the security tapes and use our national network of informants to pinpoint your identity.  We'll take your fingerprints off that shopping cart, or that cash, or we'll find you out from your check.  And then we'll come after you.  Your highly-trained guard dogs won't smell us.  Your laser beam security systems won't see us. Your Aunt Edna's sixth sense, which has never been wrong since Cousin Ernie fell into a pigpen in '63, won't detect us.  You won't be able to touch or hear or even taste us in the breeze, but you'll know we're there.  And you'll know we're watching.  Waiting for you to get thirsty.  Waiting for you to crack open that bottle of Pepsi you bought at the IGA, the bottle you bought instead of the Fresca, which, incidentally, has nothing in it except 35 mg of sodium and plenty of taste.  And when you do, we'll...well, you'll be sorry, let's put it like that.  After all, this is prime time.  Little kids might be watching or something.

"So be young, have fun, drink...Fresca.  And then you can sleep at night.  Because Fresca doesn't have any caffeine, either."

I even read it in a somewhat sinister voice.  Imagine me doing this in front of thirty 16-year-olds.  The reaction?  Dead silence.  I think I heard them blinking.  Then the class clown says, nervously, "Uh, I think I'll drink some Fresca."  And then everyone else laughed and I sat down quickly.  And that is how I decided, once and for all, to always tailor things to my audience--to avoid such humiliation again.