There’s an interesting read about the recent Grand Theft Auto style Coca Cola ad at collisiondetection here.

As you’d imagine, the gaming blogosphere has widely praised it as funny and witty. But I don’t think any of them have truly understood what’s so culturally epochal about that ad: It does not directly reference Grand Theft Auto. Nothing in the game mentions it by name, or even alludes to the name. No, the advertisers merely presume their audience is so familiar with GTA — including the way it looks, feels, and plays — that they can simply shoot forward to the complex visual joke.

I have to admit, I’m surprised. Probably because I frequently write about games for mainstream publications, I continually have to grapple with the fact that a lot of people — and I mean a lot, particularly anyone over the age of 30 — have no clue how GTA plays or feels, which is precisely why they believe it’s a tool precision-engineered for turning kids into homicidal urban vampires. But maybe I’m wrong. Coca Cola — hardly the most marginal, renegade corporation — has clearly polled the hell out of the youth market and decided that everybody and their dog a) knows about GTA and b) can recognize something that riffs off of its iconoclastic style.

I’d love to know what this ad means to someone that doesn’t know GTA. Is it totally meaningless without knowledge of the reference, or does it stand on its own two feet?