This is Costa Coffee's first ever UK television commercial. It was launched on 7 October 2010 and is voiced by actor Bill Nighy.
COMMENTS
A brilliant ad from a marketing point of view—and from language teaching point of view, since it contains examples of the first and second conditionals. But not everyone agrees—animal welfare groups have called for the ad to be dropped!
TRANSCRIPT
It is said that if you give a roomful of monkeys a typewriter each, in time they’ll write the entire works of Shakespeare. So, if we gave the monkeys coffee machines instead, would they come up with the perfect cup of coffee? No. Because great coffee isn’t born of luck. It takes time and training to be an expert barista. Not all coffees are created equal.
READ MORE
• Costa serves up first-ever TV ad – with cheeky monkeys (The Guardian)
• Animal charities want Costa Coffee to drop advert that stars monkeys (The Guardian)
• Infinite monkey theorem (Wikipedia)
FOOTNOTES
1. In 2003, an experiment was performed with six Celebes Crested Macaques. Their literary contribution was five pages consisting largely of the letter 'S'.
2. If there are as many monkeys as there are particles in the observable universe (1080), and each types 1,000 keystrokes per second for 100 times the life of the universe (1020 seconds), the probability of the monkeys replicating even a short book is nearly zero. (Wikipedia)
