The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [47]
The floodgates had now been opened—the school stadium success was written up in Coke’s hometown newspaper The Atlanta Journal-Constitution , and once administrators began hearing about the cash payments, school districts from Portland, Oregon, to Edison, New Jersey, got religion in a big way. By 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 92 percent of high schools had long-term soda contracts, along with 74 percent of middle schools and 43 percent of elementary schools. And at almost all of them, the number of vending machines increased, jumping from a lonely Coke machine by the locker room to dozens of machines scattered around the cafeteria, the auditorium, or even in the halls outside classrooms.
While the additional revenue for the company added only slightly to its massive balance sheet, the schools gave Coke access to customers at an early—and vulnerable—age. “If a high school student drinks a Coke while he’s at school, the likelihood that he’ll turn to Coke again when he’s outside school and actually has a choice becomes much greater,” says former brand manager Cardello. “Thus in the end, the goal is not just about getting kids to spend money, it’s about getting kids to choose the right brand.”
Getting inside the school building with the active support of administrators also gave Coke a back door around its long-standing strictures against advertising to children. For years, after all, Coke had directly targeted kids with special come-ons, from nature cards with the Coke logo in the 1920s to “Know Your Airplanes” decks of cards during World War II. Even back then, however, the company fretted about appearing to advertise a sugary drink to young children. The D’Arcy Agency’s ad rules included a proscription against showing “children under 6 or 7 years old,” which by the 1950s, McCann extended to children under twelve—a policy Coke supposedly continues to the present day.
Despite its restraint, however, Coke has been remarkably successful in penetrating even the youngest minds. Research has shown that babies recognize brands at anywhere from six to eighteen months, specifically requesting them by age three. Of those brands they know best, Coke is in the top five, along with Cheerios, Disney, McDonald’s, and Barbie. In a society where Coke is within an arm’s reach of desire—or part of a 360-degree landscape—even children can’t escape the ubiquitous Coke logo. But familiarity and brand loyalty, of course, are very different things. As another former Coke marketing chief once said, “With soft drink consumption, early preferences translate into later life preferences. It’s a lot easier than getting consumers to switch their brand preferences later on.”
And so, Coke has constantly found ways to do that. For decades, for instance, it has blithely produced “collectors’ items,” including Barbie dolls, playing cars, board games, delivery trucks, and other toys supposedly targeted to adults. Then there are all of those Santa ads, which subtly package the meaning of Christmas in the delivery of a bottle of Coke, imprinting the two concepts together in minds that aren’t cognitively well developed enough to distinguish the difference. Those cute polar bears serve a similar purpose. “You take any character that is cute and cuddly and fun and have them drinking down a Coca-Cola and smiling,” says Daniel Acuff, an industry ad consultant for years who created the M&M’s characters and worked on campaigns for Cap’n Crunch cereal. “That is very clearly playing on the soft spot in people in general and the cognitive un-awareness of children under twelve in particular.”
Coke has found other ways to get around its policies as well, especially on television, where it defines kids’ shows as those in which 50 percent of the audience is under twelve. At least since the last decade, however, the