Over the last two weeks in Brand Champ or Chump, we’ve considered environmental spots from Honda and Toyota. Each was crowned as a Brand Champ.
This week, we’re changing it up and featuring the new Coke Creatures campaign.
In this spot, we see a mysterious man push a large box up to the top of a hill. He opens the box, which turns out to be an organ with little creatures inside.
The man then begins playing the keyboard. With each hit of a key, a drop of Coke falls into the creature’s mouths. They begin to sing “Yeah Yeah Yeah” and “La La La” (a track written and produced by electro superstar Calvin Harris). The fun tune soon attracts a crowd of young people. All of the dancing sprouts Coke bottles from the grass.
I’m not sure what to make of this spot, which is part of Coke’s new Open Happiness platform.
I have to admit: the track grew on me after listening to it several times. In fact, it’s in my head right now. It’s annoyingly happy and upbeat.
The creatures aren’t particularly cute to me. I’m reminded of a strange combination between Ewoks and Gremlins. One of them reminds me of the legendary Wookiee Chewbacca from Star Wars.
Coke’s gone out of its way to breathe life into these creatures. You can find them on Facebook, Flickr, and of course they have their very own site: www.cokecreatures.com.
When young people start running up the hill to join in on the fun, I was reminded of Coke’s much-loved “Hilltop” commercial, which most of you will remember for the song I’d like to Buy the World a Coke.
The goal is the same: make people happy. But while the classic piece is gloriously inspirational, the new Coke Creatures bit is just plain silly. Or is it gloriously silly?
Do you think this piece can help Coke build positive feelings around the brand?
Watch it for yourself and let me know what you think we have here:
- A brand champ?
- A brand chump?
- Somewhere in between?
Ugh. The commercial and the little creatures aren’t that bad, but using this as a basis brand building is when branding goes a little bonkers. Perhaps I’ve been working with small businesses too much. The brand has to actually provide value for a small business, because they can’t afford to throw money away on nutty brand personalities and their facebook pages and photoshopped travel photos.
Based on some of the behind the scenes video, it looks like these little creatures are all animatronic and puppets… very cool art. Very terrible ROI on the ad, probably. But with Coke’s branding budget, I suppose they don’t even attempt to measure ROI on these ads.
Brand Chumpety Chump, I say.
Nice blog, btw!
Chump! Too creepy for a drink I enjoy so much!
The difference between Coke and Pepsi personality-wise is that Pepsi consistently comes across as being experimental and mobile, design-conscious and youthful, while Coke continuously employees novelty creative concepts that exist for their own sake: to get creative pros talking to one another about their ideas.
So Coke has the persona of a huge, staid, monolithic marketer dumping product concepts into the marketplace via their brand, which seems to only stand for heritage and history at best, and a desperate lack of direction at worst.
Smack! http://cuffari.com/blog/
At best the commercial made me chuckle once or twice as the little creatures reminded me of the Ewoks form Star Wars. Outside of that I didn’t feel much of a connection with it. Didn’t care for the tune either – it got monotonous in a hurry – and everything else seemed a bit over the top. The crowd, the creatures, and the sloppy looking dude wearing the Abraham Lincoln hat were all just too weird.
Very strange creatures that I do not think are very appealing infact they are rather creepy!! I am not quite sure what Coca-Coal are trying to achieve with this ad campaign. Here is a new outdoor campaign that is a little more in line with Coca-Cola’s brand image http://mktgcliks.blogspot.com/2009/06/coca-cola-la-live-spot.html/ It is very creative and follows thier brand image.
It’s fun, cheer up! Definitely a Brand Champ
Definitely Brand Champ! Thanks, Coke, for trying new things, going out on a limb, and making things fun for us : ).
definitely defines ‘coca-cola’ upbeat timeless aura! champ it up of course!! ;D