Hours and hours spent on Facebook, on Instagram, leaving a comment or sharing any kind of subject, from foods to cats. Are you a social dependent as well? No worries, Coca-Cola has come up with an unusual way of getting us to put down our smartphones and break the social media habit.

The brand has designed a “Social Media Guard” for its latest ad that promises to “ take the social out of media and put it back in your life”. The commercial mocks people who Instagram photos of their meals instead of talking to their friends over dinner, dads who ignore their kids because they’re on their phone and little children who are too busy looking at cat videos to notice their actual pet cat.

A tongue-in-cheek product, similar to a pet collar that dogs wear to  keep them from scratching and licking their wounds. Fashioned in Coke’s signature red color, the Social Media Guard is meant to help people refrain from staring down at their phones. This is the magic cure against all of social-media illnesses, that force us to look  up from the screen , to witness sunsets and look into other human beings’ eyes.

The takeaway from the commercial could be that enjoying an ice cold Coca-Cola will put you back in the moment and make you stop frantically checking to see if anyone’s faved your latest pithy House of Cards tweet. The soda also might send you on a corn-syrup-induced sugar high, too, but it’ll only help you tweet faster.

Coke’s not the first brand to use a social media platform to taunt social media users. Last June, Applebee’s mocked mommy bloggers, Twitter users and Pinterest users in its “Life’s Better Shared” campaign. Buick’s “Get Off The Phone” video featuring comic duo Rhett and Link is even more similar to Coke’s latest campaign, urging people to “Get in the Moment” by putting down their phones.

References:

http://betabeat.com/2014/02/coca-cola-ad-debuts-handy-social-media-guard-to-keep-you-from-texting/

http://lifewise.canoe.ca/Living/YourLife/2014/02/20/21484966-relaxnews.html

http://marketingland.com/latest-spoof-ad-coke-wants-give-world-pet-collar-cure-social-media-addition-74755