The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [48]
In addition to commercials during the program, Coke puts Coke cups into the hands of judges and brands a backstage “red room” with Coke pictures on the walls, Coke coolers, and a “red couch,” where performers are interviewed among Coke logos. “You couldn’t ask for better TV,” enthused one Coke VP in USA Today. “If you look at ratings, it’s got universal appeal—everything from kids to 35- to 64-[year-olds].”
Television shows aren’t the only realm where Coke has used product placement to appeal to kids. In 2001, Creative Artists Agency brokered a $150 million deal for Coke to be the exclusive sponsor for the Harry Potter movies—based on the wildly popular book about a child wizard that spurred a generation of tweens to start reading. In the deal worked out with Warner Bros., Coke wouldn’t appear in the movie, nor would any of the characters be seen drinking it (after all, the film’s young star, Daniel Radcliffe, was only eleven years old at the time). However, characters and symbols from the film were plastered on packages for Coke, Minute Maid juices, and Hi-C, leaving no doubt who the company was pitching to. “Kids love Harry Potter, and we are confident the affiliation will be very good for us,” said a spokesman for Minute Maid, even as a Coke spokeswoman insisted, “The target is really families and not just kids.”
The movie earned nearly $1 billion worldwide—the second-highest-grossing film at the time behind Titanic—and Coca-Cola Enterprises spokesperson John Downs called Potter the most successful campaign of the year. It was enough to spur a push to product placement in movies. Coke appeared in eighty-five of them between 2001 and 2009, third behind Apple and Ford in frequency. While many were marketed to adults, several were even more conspicuously aimed at kids, including the 2005 Dream Works film Madagascar, featuring animated zoo animals escaping from New York, as well as such preteen fare as Elf, Are We There Yet?, Scooby-Doo, and the Disney live-action princess fantasy Enchanted.
Finally, in 2002, Coke made the leap to online advertising with Coke Studios, an online world where users could create avatars called “V-Egos” and put together their own music mixes with different virtual instruments. In 2007, the company followed it up with an entire branded world, CC Metro—which must look much like what Doug Ivester imagined when he envisioned the concept of a “360-degree landscape” of Coke. In this world, avatars move around an entire three-dimensional city, buying cool clothes, riding on hovercraft and skateboards, and talking with fellow fans of Coke. And while they are doing all these cool things, they are surrounded by Coke’s advertising images—with logos on billboards, blimps, and park benches, fountains and statues in the shape of Coke’s hobbleskirt bottle, and various stores and restaurants where you can spend real money to buy virtual glasses and bottles of Coke products. (Strangely, there are very few ads for anything but Coke Classic.) Soon after it opened, it was getting more than 100,000 visitors a month—no doubt many of them children, given the video game interface and the range of activities available.
With that kind of success reaching young audiences, schools must have seemed to Coke just another avenue to “getting them young.” But in doing so, it failed to see how cynical it seemed to sell to children who had no other choice but to spend eight hours a day in the glow of the Coke machine.
Almost immediately after forming the new Public