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Starbucks Commercials

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You can love or hate Starbucks for a lot of reasons.  I love it because for the price of a cup of coffee I can rent office space for an hour or two to work on a project while waiting for an appointment.  It's also a great neutral place to meet people to talk about projects or whatever.

I recently saw a series of commercials for Starbucks' new instant coffee.

Starbucks Postal Workers

Starbucks Three Men

Starbucks Town Hall

I'm nearly certain the creative folks in the advertising people meant one thing, but to me it has a completely different meaning.  To me what these commercials say is smiling lackeys, people that are jokes and screaming idiots can't tell the difference and we think we can fool you too.

Now, I'm not saying this to bag on Starbucks' advertising guys, but instead using it to illustrate the point of subtext.  Dialog can and frequently does tell us what the character wants us to believe while the action and visuals tell us what is actually going on.