The drinks we grew up with came with their own songs. Some of us still know them.
There is a Ginseng Up advert from the nineties, the one with Valdez and Torry, that a certain generation can still half-sing on request. Most of them could not tell you the last time they actually drank a Ginseng Up. The advert stuck anyway. It ran between the programmes on an ordinary evening, often enough that it lodged somewhere permanent, and there it has stayed.
This happened with a lot of the drinks. The market was small, the local channels few, and the same handful of adverts ran and ran. Repetition did the work. A jingle you heard three times a night for a year is a jingle you have for life, whether you wanted it or not. Ask anyone who grew up in the islands in the eighties and nineties to name a drink advert and watch how fast the song comes back, ahead of the words for it.
Supligen had one of the strongest. The Jamaican liquid meal in the can, around since 1976, made its way across the whole region, and the advert travelled with it. You knew the can before you knew what was in it. It was the drink your mother bought when she decided you were not eating enough, the one an athlete held up after training, the one that turned up at every corner shop from Kingston to Basseterre. We do not stock it, not yet. But you will not find many Kittitians of a certain age who cannot picture the can.
Ting was another. The grapefruit soda with the advert that leaned on the one thing the drink had that nothing else did, that sharp bitter-sweet bite, and a tune to carry it. There were others, fading in and out of memory now: the malt drinks, the shandies, the sodas that came and went. Each one had its thirty seconds and its song.
What is strange, looking back, is how homemade most of it was. These were not international campaigns dubbed for a small market. A lot of them were shot locally, acted by people you might recognise, scored with a jingle written down the road. The production showed, and that was the charm. The advert was as local as the drink, and it sounded like home because it was made at home.
For the diaspora, this turns into something more than memory. A drink you grew up with is a taste you can buy again, ship to a flat in London or Toronto, and have arrive in a week. The advert is the part you cannot ship. It lives in your head, and in the odd clip someone has saved and put online, which is why those clips get watched and shared the way they do. They are a piece of an evening you cannot otherwise get back.
So we have put one back where it belongs. The Ginseng Up advert, Valdez and Torry and all, now sits on the Ginseng Up page, under the bottle. Buy the drink if you want the drink. Watch the advert because you already know how it goes.