Coke: It's The (Un)Real Thing

Speaking of bad moves, we were struck by how a recent national campaign for new Coke Zero has gone wrong.

The execution sounded familiar: reach a youth demographic with graffiti and guerilla marketing via a web site that revealed its true purpose over a period of weeks, then went public with a TV and print marketing campaign.

And indeed it was familiar - it was precisely the components of a campaign we proposed in 2004 for the Gold Coast City Council, right down to 'seeding' on-line chat rooms with hints that readers might find the web site interesting.

But our campaign was aimed at saving young lives. Where Coke went wrong is summed up by anti-Zero web site owner Tim Longhurst:

"What you have here is a person appearing to be someone who is genuinely interested in getting people to think about the way they're living their lives. At the end of the day they're not interested in you, what they're interested in is you drinking their latest carbonated beverage."

Back in 2004, we were well aware of the potential for aspects of the campaign to backfire on us and our client. Our proposal to include graffiti marketing was not original and had gone badly wrong some time earlier for marketers of the movie XXX.

But they say the difference between graffiti and art is permission and we proposed chalk stencilling the campaign web address only on footpaths outside schools and at public skatebowls - in other words, only on Council property.

This aspect of the campaign was nixed, however, by Council officers who, quite rightly, felt they could not endorse their own graffiti while running campaigns against the blight of real graffiti vandalism.

However, every other aspect of the proposed campaign was played out successfully, including TV and radio commercials that started by misleading the audience into believing they were being sold a new movie only to learn at the end that they'd been 'sucked in' to stopping and actually paying attention to a public safety message.

Repurposed, the TVC also screened again this summer at Gold Coast cinemas and was still achieving its intended effect to deceive - but with the target audience's best interests at heart.

It's not a marketing move we'd ever recommend to a client simply seeking commercial promotion. The potential for backlash seems plainly obvious to us.

It can be tempting to get carried away by a great campaign idea, but at Business Communications Management, we make it part of the process to not only anticipate how a campaign might go right, but also every way in which it could go wrong.