Pepsi Will Run 60 Seconds of Deafening Advertising Silence on The Super Bowl

Pepsi will be running a :60 spot on the Super Bowl that needed no sound editing. The ad, scheduled to run pre-game, reportedly features a joke that originates from the deaf community and is delivered entirely in visual form--total silence for 60 seconds.

That ad was concepted, and stars, PepsiCo employees. "It's a popular story and we just turned it into an advertisement," said Clay Broussard, a supply and logistics manager at PepsiCo who proposed the idea for the ad. "This is the PepsiCo flavor of that joke."

According to the AP, the joke goes like this:

Two guys are driving to their friend Bob's house to watch the Super Bowl. Once they get to Bob's street, neither knows which house is his. They sit in the car, arguing, until one of them has an idea. He starts laying on the horn, and one by one, the houses light up and dogs start barking.

One house stays dark and quiet: It's Bob's.

Deaf people will be falling out of their chairs in disbelief, National Association of the Deaf president Bobbie Beth Scoggins wrote in an e-mail response to questions. Hearing people, Scoggins wrote, will stop what they're doing to see why there are no sounds. She believes it's an historic first for an ad featuring American Sign Language to get such prominent play.