It must be really nice to work on the Coke advertising account. Unlimited budget, and no need to find any truly original tagline. Seriously you could put 10 verbs in one bag and 20 nouns or feelings in the other and with a little scrabble-esque whirl in the bag come up with a tagline that fits Coke perfectly. Then the creative team has to somehow combine the sun, beautiful young people and long refreshing swigs from a Coke bottle with some marginally original idea. Oh and add in a catchy upbeat song that wouldn’t work in the charts but is perfect as a jingle. There you have ‘Open Happiness’. Everything you would expect from Coke except this time..It’s Digital!!
And they’re doing it right. Apparently. Three ambassadors will travel around the world facebooking, tweeting, uploading, blogging and [insert random digital verb here]ing about their travels. Sounds pretty good so far but will it be a one way dialogue or will Coke allow consumer interaction to decide and make suggestions where these ambassadors go because if it’s just a travel log with Coke branding everywhere then I reckon consumers would rather look to independents or Lonely Planet experts for these experiences. The ambassadors themselves were chosen through recommendations by media companies and the likes of Lonely Planet culminating in some sort of online voting that nobody really ever heard about. Maybe Coke missed a trick here. The Greatest Job in the World campaign certainly got a lot of attention (although I do wonder if this attention was massive in Australia due to the location of the job) and Coke could certainly have run a similar competition for these roles. Maybe a Chinese, an Indian, a European, an African and an American chosen from be competitions within these regions might have created a lot more buzz. It’s certainly going to be interesting to see how it goes. It could go well if there’s actual consumer involvement. I mean a vote for the ambassador to eat one of several local delicacies perceived as indigestible by your average western voter would be interesting. Or voting on the tattoo the ambassador gets as a memento at the end of the adventure. The possibilities are endless. The online game related to the campaign seems to offer Itune vouchers as a prize. Pity the game is slow and annoying. And on a related note it’s a little ironic that Cornetto’s new site is titled ‘no boring bits’.