A1 Makes Meat Loaf Sing

One of A1’s, the steak sauce, newest television/viral ads is “A1 Makes Meat Loaf Sing.” In this 40 odd seconds commercial, you see a white male wearing a royal blue bathrobe labeled “MEAT” and bunny slipper go to the kitchen and takes out the pan of meat loaf. He then takes the dish to the pool side and drizzle some A1 sauce on it. He takes a bite, music starts playing in the background, he says “yum” and starts singing. He then gets on a ladder and pours a gigantic bottle of A1 on the meatloaf and the slogan comes on that says “A1 Makes Meat Loaf Sing.”

This ad is definitely intertextual. When I first stumbled upon this ad on television, I thought that the slogan meant that A1 sauce tastes so good with meatloaf that it makes the actual meatloaf sing. However, the friend who I saw this commercial with was laughing his butt off at this. He then tells me that the man in the commercial eating the meatloaf is a singer named Meat Loaf. The advertisers at A1 wanted those who understood the mythic meaning of the ad (the fact that the man IS indeed Meat Loaf) to understand that A1 sauce tastes so good that even this famous singer is going to sing in rejoice. In Advertisements, Bignell asserts that the “function of the linguistic signs is to ‘anchor’ the various meanings of the image.” So, even though I initially did not know who Meat Loaf is, I still understood that A1 sauce is suppose to taste very good. This ad also demonstrates “the potential ambiguity of the visual signs and linguistic syntagms” if the viewer does not understand the mythic meaning of the ad (Bignell).

Here is the video of the A1 commercial: