If you own a television and watch things moving around on the screen after about 7 at night, you’ve probably seen the most recent spot for Bailey’s Irish Cream, which takes place at a “zero gravity bar”. The bartender accidentally knocks over a bottle, and globules of yummy Irish Cream begin bouncing all over the place, to the delight of the customers.

The first fifty times I saw this ad, I could not for the life of me figure out why on earth the management at Bailey’s approved it, or even why an advertising exec would allow the ad to survive the storyboard phase. It seemed to offer nothing to further the usual messages of alcohol advertisement: none of the guys looked particularly virile, the women weren’t wearing bikinis or slinky cocktail dresses or hanging on their boyfriends’ every word, there were no race cars or fighter jets or booze bottles ejaculating into glasses. Not only was it drab and uninteresting by advertising standards—let alone alcohol advertising standards—the CG and wire effects must have made it fairly costly as well. WTF?

It finally hit me a couple of days ago. It’s fairly subtle, as these things go. In the last five or ten seconds of the ad, a gently undulating blob of Bailey’s achieves a sort of equilibrium, floating high above the floor of the bar, near the center of the room. A girl launches off of one wall, intent on taking the blob down. A couple of other quick scenes pass, and another girl is seen approaching the same blob of booze from the other side of the room, eyes fixed, mouth smiling and slightly open.

Oh, thank goodness. For a while there I was afraid that this Bailey’s ad was utterly devoid of time-tested content. What a relief to discover it contains imagery linking consumption of Bailey’s to girls making out with each other.