Poppin’ Layers is not a good commercial (or music video). The Trident Player is not a good rapper. Rapping about Trident Layers gum for four minutes and 34 seconds is not very funny. At this point in pop culture, the vaguely racist whiteboy poser with a fake rapper voice is just about the laziest choice for any creative or artistic project. It was lazy/dumb 10 years ago when Malibu’s Most Wanted came out. Trident and Hollywood’s Mischievous Studios, which is behind this music video, can do better.
It would be easy to mock this campaign and be mean, but I’m not going to. You really don’t have to watch more than the first 15 seconds to get the video’s full effect. You may not know that the actors in the clip are all popular on Vine, which is mostly irrelevant, because it’s Vine. However, everyone should use this opportunity to learn from mistakes. Using Vine as a marketing platform is not very wise, especially with Instagram and SnapChat clearly dominating social media video sharing. Using lazy stereotypes is, well, lazy and uninteresting. The only press that can come from something like this is bad press from people who think it lacks any sort of awareness or intelligence. I get that gum brands are supposed to be cool and irreverent, but Poppin’ Layers is just amateurishly off the mark.