Word: colas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
BELIEVE IT OR NOT, COCA-Cola actually paid its advertising agency to plant that message on a hotline for its newest product. But then, trashing its own claims is just part of the campaign for OK soda, a bubbly, mildly fruity drink for teenagers and young adults that Coke hopes will be its next blockbuster beverage and that the company is testing in nine cities from Boston to Seattle. With OK's deliberately drab cans and pseudo-Zen profundities ("What's the point of OK soda? Well, what's the point of anything?"), Coke hopes to capture a generation that...
Which is exactly what attracts Coca-Cola and other consumer firms to teens in the first place. American adolescents last year spent as much as $89 billion on the latest trends in food, clothing, videos, music and, of course, soda; teens spent more than $3 billion of their own money on soft drinks alone. Yet America's 27.8 million teenagers are merely the vanguard of a global 12-to-20 market that numbers nearly 1 billion youths. Moreover, this mass of teens, particularly in the developing nations of Asia and Latin America, are far more influenced by U.S. products...
...then, just as suddenly as this bubbly abberation landed in Cambridge, the spell was broken. "OK" was promoted by a prime-time television commercial blitz. Is this low key? Would Douglas Coupland approve? Doesn't this undercut the whole idea of Generation X Cola...
...shouldn't have been too surprised. After all, do you know who makes the stuff? Coca-Cola, of course...
This changed things somewhat. The little oval-headed man was no longer a quirky symbol of non-conformity, but a poorly drawn stand in for Coca-Cola's stable of cardboard cut-out super-star shills. And the once appealing casualness of "OK" marketing? Just another calculated effort at cultural hegemony that we overeducated, undermotivated Generation X-ers are supposed to so delight in detecting...