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Leamington Letters #69:Coke, commercials and consensus

13/2/2014

11 Comments

 
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The Patriots didn't make it to the Super Bowl this year, and the Seattle defence is so invincible, that I decided to give the whole thing a miss.

I even missed the ads, which are a traditional highlight, especially for someone who has worked in the advertising field for years and even scripted a commercial (for the Volvo VN truck) which featured in the Super Bowl back in the mid-90s. So I've been catching up via YouTube.

This year, of course, we had two which featured Columbia recording artist, Mr Bob Dylan. The first was merely an appalling misuse of his song I Want You for yoghurt or something; the second, for Chrysler, actually starred the man himself and incorporated an analysis of international manufacturing capabilities, culminating in an exhortation to buy cars from Detroit: “Well, it's sundown on the union/And what's made in the USA/Sure was a good idea/'Til greed got in the way” as he didn't say in the commercial.

However, the commercial which provoked the most attention (outside the Bobosphere, that is) was for Coke.

It was kept under wraps until the moment it showed on Fox, and you might think that it was pretty old-fashioned and innocuous, if truth be told. It featured a number of American people doing American things in American landscapes with a soundtrack of America, the Beautiful, sung in nine different languages.

And that is the issue. Nine different languages! English, Spanish, Tagalog, Mandarin, Hindi, Hebrew, Keres, French and Arabic. What's going on here?

As Michele Bachmann told Fox News, “if English was good enough for Jesus when he wrote the bible, it should be good enough for Coke”. Todd Starnes, another Murdoch mercenary, claimed that “Coke is the official soft drink of illegals crossing the border”. And others too numerous to mention and too obscure to dignify with a reference jumped in with equally absurd comments.

The problem with this is that it prompts people like me to want to defend Coca-Cola, which I have no wish to do. The Coke bottle is the iconic symbol of American imperialism. Through Coke, the cultures of scores of countries were - and are being - transformed. Whole generations are being Americanized at the expense of their own national cultures.

But what is wrong with that? We can see from this commercial that America is multi-lingual, multi-racial, multi-cultural. Everything for which one might wish. A beautiful country, home of the brave and land of the free.

Except that what is portrayed in this commercial is very different from that which Coke has represented over the years, when the real thing has been WASP-ish to say the least. And very different from what the increasingly desperate right wing of America wish it to be, which does not include the prefix “multi-”.

That Coke, the epitome of the imperialist right, is now a target of the imperialist right is vaguely encouraging. I think.

Not least because one thing I do know is that advertisers do not, in any way, wish to be cutting edge. A successful advertising campaign is a reflection of the zeitgeist. Its starting point is the existing cultural consensus of its target audience.

And it’s clear that Coke and its agency, Weiden+Kennedy, now believe that diversity is the essence of the American zeitgeist.

It is equally clear that there are still many who find this as unpalatable as I find the product.

But you’ve got to admit, if Coke is using multi-culturalism to shift soda, America might be moving in the right direction.

Which isn’t to the right.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Been listening to the Dylan and Dead shows from ’86 and ’87 to mark the 25th anniversary of the official, and dreadful, album. 1987-07-19 at Eugene is quite brilliant. Subsequently, moved on to a quality audience tape of my Royal Albert Hall show last year. It appears that it was better than I thought and wrote at the time, musically at least. Sorry Bob.

11 Comments
Allan
13/2/2014 01:32:02

Good piece. More significant than the commercial, which seems to have disappeared from Youtube, is the response. The right saw it as a provocation, and I agree that there is a sense of desperation as well as idiocy and ignorance in some of the comments. One assumes that the commercial would have been heavily and intensely researched. So Coke knew what it was doing and made a judgement as to which way its future lies. Things have changed as your man would say.

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Ellie
13/2/2014 01:49:25

I've never heard of a couple of these languages! Where are they spoken? Apart from the US, I mean!

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Thom
13/2/2014 04:37:03

And don't forget Macdonald's. They certainly embrace diversity when recruiting for their Macjobs.

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Anders
13/2/2014 05:59:21

Yes, of course. We criticise advertising for stimulating false consumer demands and assume that ads are drivers of the system. In fact, they are merely reflections of what is already going on in the world. Just one element of many. Have to say, good for Coke. The more the Fox right argue, the more I like them.

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Angela Jackson
13/2/2014 06:27:25

America, the Beautiful. Written by Katherine Lee Bates. Who was she? you ask. A lesbian. A socialist. A feminist.

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CJ
13/2/2014 09:04:51

Ha! Changed your mind about the RAH shows! But you are absolutely right about the Dead shows - apart from those towards the end when Jerry was about to become (literally) comatose. Strange stuff happening over here in the US, and you've identified one of them. There was a certain irony in the ad being broadcast on Fox!

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Max
16/2/2014 00:54:46

Thanks to Parn for reminding me of the rehearsals for these shows at Club Front. I used to have them on cassette, which have gone missing, but they are still streamable at archive.org. Rambling, diverse, weird and wonderful by turns.

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DavidC
14/2/2014 00:06:38

You didn't mention the SodaStream debacle and Scarlett Thingy. Where do you stand on that?

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Sean
14/2/2014 04:25:37

Spot on again Max. Marvelous.

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Rick Hough
16/2/2014 23:17:26

Deftly served, as usual. I really liked the ad when it ran And I'm impressed with Coke's seeming logic that they can scorch the conservative right in the US in exchange for a strengthened position in global markets. If coke is perceived abroad to be quintessentially American and simultaneously accepting of diverse cultures, it has to play well abroad, even where the spot doesn't see large scale airing. Furthermore, the production value of the piece rendered such a loving embrace of the ads central premise, they almost had us believing they cared about the idea.

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Sean
13/3/2014 07:18:37

What do you expect from a company that sells diabetes in a can, treats other countries' environments as their own personal cesspool, uses hit squads to murder union leaders, supported apartheid, paid over $190 million in a class action racial discrimination lawsuit etc etc. a revolting 'drink' better suited to cleaning metal. Killer coke indeed.

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    Max Smith

    European writer, radical, restaurateur and Red Sox fan. 70-something husband, father, step-father, grandfather and son. Resident in Warwick, England.

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