Adkritik.

"Taste the Algorithm" is set in white across a magenta-to-cyan gradient, with a trademark symbol attached and a supporting line reading "NOW WITH 40% MORE ENGAGEMENT." A can sits at the right. The work is competently produced: the type is well kerned, the can renders convincingly, the composition holds at distance.

None of which addresses the problem, which is that the ad has nothing to say about the drink.

The line

Consider what "Taste the Algorithm" asks of a reader. It offers no flavour, no occasion, no promise, and no joke that resolves. It borrows the vocabulary of recommendation systems, which is a vocabulary people mostly encounter while being annoyed by one. The trademark symbol makes the borrowing worse: it insists that a phrase nobody has ever spoken is now an asset to be defended.

The support line compounds it. Engagement is a measure of how content performs, not of how a beverage tastes. A drink advertised in the units of a social media report is a drink whose makers have stopped picturing anyone drinking it.

The gradient

The colour does the same job as the line. Magenta to cyan is not a soda colour, it is a slide-deck colour, the visual shorthand for "modern" that arrives whenever nobody has decided what the product actually looks like. It is applied at full saturation across the whole field, which leaves the can, the only concrete thing in the frame, competing with its own background.

What survives the drive

A billboard gets a few seconds of divided attention. Spend them here and the message that lands is roughly: pink, robot, soda. That is not nothing, but it is not a reason to buy, and it is not recall the brand can bank, because the phrase attaches to a category mood rather than to FizzCo.

The exception

The small print, "FizzCo is not responsible for what the algorithm tastes like," is genuinely funny, and it is the only line in the ad that sounds like a person wrote it for pleasure. It is set at eleven points at the bottom of a twelve-foot board.

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Somewhere in this project there was a writer with a sense of humour and a decision-maker who wanted the trend. The grade reflects which one won.