You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …

The Product:
University of Phoenix

The Promotion:

The Pitch:
We can teach you to be like the Hare from “The Tortoise and the Hare”!
…
In our retelling of the story, the Hare’s a hero who deserves to win. Very important we establish that.

I’m weirdly fascinated by the worldbuilding going on in this ad.

‘Cause, y’know, commercials don’t normally have worldbuilding. They’ll just present us with bizarre realities where Red Bull will give people wings, where a man will ride around with an emu telling random strangers about car insurance, where people will voluntarily consume Miracle Whip. They’ll show us these realities, but they won’t explain ’em.

These commercial worlds aren’t meant to make sense (and some of them can become downright disturbing if you think about them too hard). They’re just funny little absurd scenarios designed to get your attention and deliver the pitch in however many seconds the ad has.

Which makes it so weird that this ad has actual backstory and lore behind its world. I’m not saying it’s deep or intricate worldbuilding, but it’s there. It posits a reality where, as in the Aesop Fable of “The Tortoise and the Hare”, a Tortoise beats a Hare in a footrace by going “slow and steady” … and a hundred years on, this race has become the defining event of animal society, elevating tortoises to being the dominant species, and creating cultural mores where slowness is prized and speed is seen as unsavory. Into this world, a Hare must arise to challenge society, overcome discrimination, and convince the tortoises of the value of speed (all using skills they learned at University of Phoenix).

That’s a lot of buildup just to tell people this university can let them do their education fast.

Like, between building this whole world out of something so small, having an underdog overcoming society, and the CGI animation … it kinda feels like someone had a rejected pitch for a Pixar movie lying around and decided, “Hey, this’d make a good commercial!”