super bowl XLVIII (2009) : coke's sizzling tv ad

just gorgeous production values. well lit, great colors, just simply well done. it's not the coke ad we are used to seeing but this one gets you to pay attention and appreciate nature.

what is the song that they have in this ad? i could not care less for it. they should have used a more familiar song/melody as music bed. a great music would have improved this ad twofold.

add the Coke Zero ad, it will equal to a sum zero ad, plus ADS Sindrome

What is with Coke and other worldly characters in their ads?

This Coke Zero ad is the second time this marketing year that they have other worldly characters in their ads. The first ones were the angel and the devil in their regular Coke thematic brandsell advertising.

In that ad, the angel in heaven got curious on the fizz that coke was making, flies down to earth to check it out, tries Coke, gets enamoured with it, then decides to become human to continue to enjoy Coke. Cute, interesting and straightforward story.

Except for one thing- they got carried away and added a devil character to the story where the angel turned human meets a handsome man who also enjoys Coke but turns out to be the devil as a last close up shot of the man reveals he has the horn impressions on his forehead, implying he is a devil turned human.

We did say a lot about this ad, things like the wings of the angel and the devil, etc. read all here in full : http://the-wawam-file.blogspot.com/search/label/coca%20cola

This new Coke Zero product introduces new characters to their line-up, most likely coming from Coke's large talent pool of other worldly characters- the mermaid and the centaur (ad featured here is the mermaid). We have to give 5 stars to Coke's talent casters for their stellar skills for finding such stellar pool of talents. They must travel far and wide to find such a wide range of talents. Up next will probably be Tinkerbell herself or the tikbalang.




This ad is about a male hunk in a swimming pool whose attention is caught by a hot lady drinking Coke Zero. It's unclear if the it's the hot lady in a swimsuit or the new Coke Zero product that she is drinking that caused him to move towards her. But the hunk uses Coke Zero banter as an opening line to strike a conversation with the hottie.

We all know that Coke is really just colored water with lots of sugar in it and that common knowledge the hunk uses to talk to the hottie, with a zinger line : "Impossible, right? Real Coke taste without sugar? Impossible!". The hottie says it is possible and he better believe it, saying that it is time the hunk believes in the impossible. The hottie dives into the water revealing her lower half, she revelas her tail, the hottie is a mermaid. And the mermaid that got away from the hunk as she swims back to sea.

The ad wants us to believe the impossible - the taste of regular Coke in Coke Zero even though it has zero sugar in it. We are the kind who are very skeptical and not prone to easily believe those that we know are not possible. Apparently for us, it takes a lot to make us believe in the impossible.

We are supposed to believe the impossible that Coke Zero was able to achieve because a mermaid says so. A mermaid who all of us know is not possible as mermaids don't exist in real life, except in fairy tales and cartoons which are all man-made.

That is like shooting themselves in the foot.

The ad wants us to change our mind about something that going in we think is not real and not possible. The ad wants us to think that a regular Coke taste is now made real and possible. And yet the character they used in the ad to convince us on that is a mermaid who we all know is not real and not possible. We are supposed to believe a fairy tale character, an unreal on something that is supposed to be true in real life.

The use of the mermaid can be cute but it defies the logic of what they want to achieve in the ad. The first question that popped in my mind was - what is it that Coke wants us to believe? Is this ad about the reality of Coke Zero tasting like regular Coke without the sugar or is it about the unreality of mermaids?

It's wierd that they are using an unreal character to make us believe reality.

This Coke Zero ad when you add the two key story elements of the ad do end up to a sum zero. In other words, it's a WAWAM! and has ADS Sindrome.

coca cola's lebron and yao ming tv spot

great appeal to the youth market and perfect for the olympics. it's amazing that coke got lebron and yao in one tv commercial. i don't mind this celebrity endorser ad, it's fun to watch.

buhay coke buksan mo - sandwich tv spot

this was one of the executions behind coke's previous campaign, "buhay coke buksan mo", the campaign that was difficult to understand (discussed previously). even this ad is difficult to understand. you can't tell what it is about our "buhay" that they are unravelling or opening. and more importantly, what role coke has in all of that. i bet the creatives were extremely proud and happy about this spot. i like creativity, but it first needs to be understandable to the target audience. this ad is creative only to those who wrote it, but not to the audience who don't understand it.

there is one more problem with this tv spot - it very much looks like pepsi tv spots. only, pepsi's spots are easy to understand.

compare this spot to the coke angel tv spot and you can immediately tell the differences and improvements they have made on their ad campaign. the tagline of the coke angel ad is excellent, "buhay coke tikman mo"; it's single minded and strong on taste and refreshment, coke's core positioning; and the story is much simpler and easy to understand, even with the irritating inclusion of the devil in the ad.

(philippine ads) - (high concept) - (entertainment) = WAWAM!

i agree the lack of high concepts is killing philippine advertising. many of the ads we see have very weak and too simplistic creative concepts. many of these are not campaigns, but just tv spots. they don't have legs.

the other part that i think is missing is ENTERTAINMENT VALUE. because tv advertising are aired on tv and tv's primary role in our lives is to provide us with entertainment, it begs that ads should also entertain. entertainment does not have to be humor, or the equivalent of comedy shows on TV, but they just have to entertain us - make us want and enjoy watching the tv commercial. tv has a lot of program formats and all of these, they be news, comedy, drama or reality shows need to entertain us in one way or the other. it does not have to be amusing or funny all the time, it just needs to capture our attention and inject some joy in viewing them.

there's very little of entertainment in philippine ads. they are just messages. they could have sent those messages through cell phone text and it would have the same impact at a much lower cost. that's how bad these ads are.

in fact, i think one of the strenghts of the coke angel tv spot is it's very entertaining.

what works and what doesn't work in the coke angel tv spot

what works in the coke angel "ang sarap dito" tv spot:

• excellent over-all production values


• brilliant jingle, arrangement and concept


• excellent talent for the angel role. perfect for the role, unknown to pinoy audience is a stroke of genius


• finally, back to basics for coke, making taste and refreshment as it's core proposition


• excellent tag line - "buhay coke, tikman mo"

what does not work in the coke angel tv spot:

• what was the inclusion of the devil in the plot all about? unnecessary, strenuous


• the wings suck!

coca cola "jinx" tv spot super bowl

this ad was one of the most talked about tv spot in the US during the super bowl. the US ad industry has made the super bowl as the yearly showcase for their most creative work. many of the ads aired in the super bowl are produced specifically for the super bowl only and some are aired only in the super bowl. it's an event for the ad industry. watching out for the best ads aired during the super bowl is a much awaited event not only for the ad industry but also for media in general and the audience.

i don't know much about frist, i only know he is one of the key republican figures in the US. carville i know more about - his call to fame was being bill clinton's top strategist during the elections that won him the presidency twice. carville's strategic skills have been hailed as top-notch and a force to reckon with. he was the guy who coined and crafted the "it's the economy, stupid" line and strategy that turned the tide for bill clinton and won him the election.

this ad's appeal will be easier to appreciate if you are an american and if you know who carville and frist are. carville and frist are competitors, they are at the opposite ends of the battle lines in US politics, one being a top republican and the other a top strategist for the democrats. they are known to be two of the smartest in US politics plus two of the most fiercely competitive. take that as the background and you will understand why this ad resonates among americans.

i am including it here to show how coke in the US has taken it's strategy through a different execution route. also, this is a very smart and excellent way to use celebrity endorsers in ads, unlike the inane ways that it is done in the philippines.



this was posted at you tube:

Using Washington, D.C. landmarks as a backdrop, "Jinx" features Democratic strategist and commentator James Carville and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. When the two utter the same word simultaneously during a television showdown, Frist invokes the "jinx" game, compelling Carville to buy him a Coke. With icy bottles of Coca-Cola in hand, the two spend the rest of the day enjoying 'The Coke Side of Life' throughout the Capital as political disagreements are temporarily forgotten.

coca cola's taste strategy

small banners in sari-sari stores carry the image of the angel with the line "tikman ang sarap". as mentioned previously, coke is obviously on a back to basics, taste strategy. and that's a very good thing. i think it's the right thing to do for coke. coke has strayed away too much from it's core positioning that it's good they now have the political will and the smarts to go back to their roots.

however, coke now runs the risk of falling off a cliff in getting confused on what exactly is their campaign. they now have a few lines that they seem to use in different media and at times a pair of them at the same time: "ang sarap dito", "tikman ang sarap" and "buhay coke tikman mo".

i hope coke has developed a brand architecture for this ad campaign to make sure they don't shoot themselves in the foot. in advertising, too many of a good thing can kill.

the question that must be raging in the minds of the ad agency and client is this - what else can we do to exploit the success of the ad campaign?

i am sure events and other below the line are in their minds now. the problem of course is the talent is not a pinoy. she probably speaks english but it will be very costly to get her to go to the philippines to do events for them. it's very lame, but i'm sure the coke creative team has asked the brazilian talent if she can sing or dance. hahaha. damn, i hope coke does not go through that route if they bring her to the philippines.

but that one is a whole new discussion all together.

back to basics - coke is on single minded taste strategy now. i bet they are now conducting a tracking study to see if taste is getting picked up and if this campaign is changing attitudes and bringing in the cases.

is this taste strategy enough to overcome the price problem? they need to stop migration away from coke and to attract new users. is taste enough?

the devil may care!

pinays seem to like the girl very much. they swoon when they see the devil in that coke ad. the country is a celebrity-crazed country, so that's not very surprising. i think people like the devil in that ad only because he looks real hot. but is the devil contributing to the story? that we do not know. but he is hot, according to women!

who the hell cares about the devil!

look at the "ang sarap dito" billboards - all you see is the angel. also, look at how people refer to the ad, it's the "coke angel" tv commercial. it's obvious, this whole ad campaign is about the angel. so, who the hell cares about the devil?!

well actually, the better question is - why the hell is the devil in that tv spot?

the story is very clear - coke tastes so good, so refreshing that even angels can hear the satisfaction of humans on earth. so loud and clear =that the angel checks out coke and after tasting it herself, it felt so good to her that she decided to be a human to make sure coke is always within her reach. that's how good tasting coke is - that even angels who live in heaven and who need nothing more on earth or in heaven find that she needs the good taste of coke.

that's the whole campaign. and where is the devil in that story?

the devil in the story adds the bad to what's all good. and that's also on a literal sense. the devil in the ad at the end of commercial changes the story to even the bad or the devil also want coke. so it's not just good people who want coke now, it's also the bad.

the directorial treatment of the ad also gives an impression of the devil is about to seduce the angel. what? a sexual tension between the angel and the devil? what the hell is that all about?

this coke ad could have just remained on the good side. there is no problem in providing some touch of humor, or a tongue in cheek story and even a humorous or interesting ending. but is the devil's role the only way to achieve those? surely there are a lot more ways, specially wholesome, nice and sweet ones, to end the commercial and provide a point of interest at the end of the ad.

so again, who the hell cares about the devil?

coke angel tv ad - back to basics

coke's previous ad campaign was difficult to understand. they had these strange drawings showing "buhay" stuff spewing up from an open coke bottle. figuring out what the graphics meant or what part of my "buhay" they represent is very difficult for ordinary mortals to understand. it was just a feel good ad campaign - the creatives feeling good for themselves for having a canvass to show how creative they are but i don't think it made consumers felt good about coca cola.

i am not sure what caused it, it was either the right strategy with a wrong execution or a bad strategy that was executed well. if the asi taulava and their christmas tv spots are an indication, i would say the problem was a bad strategy that was executed well. it's a strategy problem - either it was incorrectly written or it's meaning incorrectly interpreted.

on a strategy standpoint, coke's angel tv spot, "ang sarap dito" is a vast improvement from their previous campaign. with the current tagline "buhay coke tikman mo", the angel tv spot repositions coke to be what it really is - a softdrink meant to refresh and quench thirst. the previous tagline made coke pretend to be just a feel good product that may or may not have something to do with refreshment or thirst quenching. this one returns coke to being a liquid drink to fix thirst, back to basics as admen like to say.

this is like a back to basics ad for coke. the whole commercial is actually on a taste and thirst quenching strategy. in this ad, it's clear that people drink coke for it's taste and thirst quenching benefits. what a relief, finally, some focus for coke ads.

the ad works because of it's excellent production values. it's a very polished tv ad and we have not seen one aired in the philippines with this kind of high caliber production values for many years. i had obsessed with the crude and inconsistent post prod work and design of the wings of the angel, but i don't think ordinary consumers notice those things, nor will they care. anyone sitting in front of their tv will stop and notice this coke ad because of the excellent over-all production of the commercial.

aside from the over-all production values, what makes this coke ad stand out from the noise is the jingle. the melody is very memorable and more importantly, the interpretation and treatment of the song to make it sound like a singing angel was brilliant work. also, the choice of the talent for the angel role was very well done. she is an unknown to the philippine audience and that added to the mystery and interest for the ad.

(read more here:

http://the-wawam-file.blogspot.com/2008/04/wings-coca-cola-tv-spot.html

http://the-wawam-file.blogspot.com/2008/04/production-values-coca-cola-ang-sarap.html )

i am sure a lot of discussions have been made on this between the client and the ad agency at storyboard stage, but i didn't think adding the devil in the story at the end was needed. i fail to see it's value but i see the bad ingredients it added to the mix. i don't think it helped in the delivery of the message but what it did was make the story in the commercial unnecessarily complicated.

the point of the ad is to communicate that coke is so delicious and refreshing that even angels will want to taste it to the point of transforming to become a human. the angel deciding to become a human because of coke is the point of interest in this ad. adding the devil at the end just puts a strain to the ad.

what does adding the idea of even the devil likes its taste got to do with the story? it does not contribute to communicating the coke strategy in a better way. adding the devil brings in an unnecessary component of good vs evil. it does not also help that the treatment seem to leave an impression of some kind of attraction or a possibility of the devil seducing the angel. these are just too strenuous to the story.

is that the coke angel radio ad?

i am not sure, but i think it's the radio version of coke's angel tv spot - it's a full jingle where we hear the band, probably project 1 (?), singing the jingle. i have heard it three times already and i swear, i did not hear anywhere in the radio commercial the brand name "coke" mentioned.not even once!

that's a real strange radio ad!

the coke ad you love to hate

this was the ad coke aired last christmas. i fell off my chair when i saw that tv ad. while i agree "reconciliation" and "peace for all" is a great theme for christmas, i didn't get it why coke chose to deliver their message in the way they did in the tv ad.

coke is at minimum about good vibes, actually its always about celebration of what's good and happy. coke is one of the most wholesome brands in any market. this ad delivered the idea of reconciliation and peace for all during christmas in what seems to be a perverted sense of sentimentality. coke did not have to deliver it's message in a round about way - taking us to the sad and depressing, then to the happy. they could have just taken us straight to the happy like we expect coke ads to do.

it's a story that is not easy for children to understand. and for sure, children must have asked their parents what the story means. i can just imagine the horror and fear parents felt while they were explaining it to their children. think about it - a mother or a father is explaining to their young children a story of parents with a young daughter being separated in marriage. and doing that during christmas time - a time of family love and togetherness. are those thoughts we want our children to have during christmas?

it is really a very perverted way of delivering coke's christmas message. it was brave for coke to air this ad during christmas, but it was totally foolish. a WAWAM!

i thought it would be good to put the coke angel ad in context of what went before it.

coke knows it, but won't do it

market share is down, volume sales is down, the soda segment might be shrinking and yet there's a feeling coke is not doing some things they already know to help their situation.

sure user base shrinkage is an issue and yes, to fix that, brandsell advertising is the way to go to regain back their users and prevent further fall outs from their user-base. but in the philippine market, there are just some things you really can't argue with against consumers that advertising alone is not the solution.

this has been mentioned in WAWAM! before - often times, slow or declining business is a problem of marketing, not advertising. in this case, in my view it’s a problem of both but coke seem to be behaving like it's just a problem of advertising.

the angel tv ad is a good fix to the problem of advertising - it's a very good improvement from their previous campaign. (this will be discussed in detail next.) coke is an excellent marketer when it comes to engaging their consumers from a brand building and connecting with consumers points of view. they're very good at doing advertising that captures the essence of the psyche of their users, spending a lot of time and money on consumer research to enable it to capture consumer insights. they are also willing to spend behind it. they are an ideal client.

take things like these pins that they used in their previous ad campaign for example - it's a small item in their marketing plan and budget, but it makes it obvious how well they know their consumers. and they are very willing at going to that small a detail just to connect with their consumers.

but unfortunately, coke is not doing the other part - that of fixing the marketing problem. they have known about it, but they have become very stubborn by not doing the right things, in this case what the market demands, and that makes it all really ridiculous.

there are two - (a) they need to reduce their prices! value or cash outlay is an enduring and key issue for coke consumption in this market. they have known this for a long time but are unable to have enough political will to get it done.

they have done many tactical efforts to increase the value perception of their brand, almost everything that’s in the marketing books except to actually reduce the price!

they even bought a whole company, Cosmos Bottling, just to make sure price points no longer become an issue for them. well, almost. cosmos was killing coke then - its extremely low price was gobbling up market share and most importantly preventing coke to grow at the rate they wanted it to. coke probably realized they will eventually lose the battle with cosmos, so rather than face cosmos in the marketing arena as a competitor, they bought the whole company instead! brilliant move! (but stupid move for RFM for selling the company, a goose that laid golden eggs!)

but as theire research showed, even when they controlled the pricing and moves of cosmos (they already own it!), not much has changed in the value perception of their brands. they also did a whole slew of other packaging, pricing and SKU moves in the market but all of those were just tactical marketing moves and the negative value perception was still a huge problem for them.

as mentioned in WAWAM! previously, value is a key driver in this market. and as said, value or cash outlay is so powerful in this market that it even has the ability to trump sharon cuneta as the endorser of trio when scrambelicious is launched at a lower price than trio.

the other marketing part that coke is not doing is (b) coke's stubbornness in NOT launching new drinks in this market to directly compete with water, juices and teas. coke has done this in many other markets, especially in europe for many years already. coke has a wide range of drinks in its portfolio that they can sell in this market but for some reason are not doing it.

they seem to be so in love with coke that the feeling I get is that they feel they will be cheating on coke if they launched other brands, much like a married person feeling guilty in having a mistress.

coca cola product portfolio

this is the coca cola portfolio of products that can be launched in the philippines to directly compete with the emerging and growing segment of juices, teas and water in the market. launching any of these brands in the philippine market will enable coca cola to participate in the growing segment and more importantly defend coke.

coke angel tv spot : what works and what does not work

here's what is to look forward to in WAWAM! - the bottom line, what works and what doesn't work in the coke angel tv spot, "ang sarap dito".

we've discussed the casting and the production values, even obsessed on the wings of the angel - these are peripherals. not irrelevant but just on the peripherals of the ad campaign.

ad campaigns are business or marketing tools. companies hire ad agencies and air ad campaigns for a purpose - that of selling more cases and building market share.

for coke, these business objectives are more dire, their philippine business has suffered very much over the recent years. not only is market share and volume sales going down, incidence and per capita consumption has shrunk. this brand is losing it's franchise and its consumer base in the philippine market. and the philippine market is a very important one for coca cola worldwide - the philippine market is in the top 10 largest in the world. believe it or not, pinoys are coke addicts on a global scale!

it's a simplistic way of looking at business performance, but next time you eat in a restaurant, check out the drinks people have on their tables - when it used to be mostly coke, now it's mostly drinks other than coke. you have ice lemon tea, water and other juices. don't you see a lot more people carrying with them bottled water and those tea drinks like C2 than coke? even the takatak boys in the traffic lights don't sell coke.

the tough part is that coke has done the right things - they have set up vending machines everywhere, they introduced smaller sized bottles and therefore lower cash outlay SKUs but to no avail. per capita consumption, along with market share and volume sales are sliding.

is this coke angel tv spot up to the task of giving coke wings to fly? that's next in WAWAM!

to be continued………….

compare those to coke angel's wings

victoria's secret angel pics

these are NOT the pictures of victoria's secret angels i was referring to in my post. i could not seem to find them in the internet. but i clearly remember the gorgeous angels with their majestic wings of the earlier victoria's secret shows. the most recent VS angel shows had wings that were too hyped up, very theatrical versions already.

just the same, i'm posting the pics here for a simple reason - they look nice to look at. enjoy.

coke angel tv ad - do angels have disheveled wings?

they are probably using this artwork for print or billboard materials. notice the rendition of the wings. that's not the same kind of wings we see in the tv ad. this one looks more believable, well i think at least they look closer to our expectations.

this version has long and big feathers at the tail, which makes sense. but the top are small, fluffy and disheveled. why would an angel have disheveled wings? even birds don't have disheveled wings.

to those not in advertising, yes that's how serious we can get in producing ads. people who are not in advertising will get shocked on the amount and kind of details that need to be threshed out and agreed to before an ad is produced and the kind of revisions that need to be done to get it perfect. that's also one of the major reasons why producing an ad can get very very expensive. it's a 30 second commercial, but you spend millions of pesos to finish one and can take anywhere from 3 to 15 days to finish! serious money is spent on productions, and that's not including the amount of money advertisers spend on airing the ads. coca cola will probably spend hundreds of millions of pesos on this ad campaign alone. it is pretty serious.


blogs on this coke ad:

http://creepygerry.blogspot.com/
http://www.cokeangel.blogspot.com/


to be continued......

production values - the coke angel tv ad "ang sarap dito" spot

i think this coke ad is one of the most polished production i have seen on philippine tv. thailand has become one of the top destination for production work for ads in asia and it shows very well in this ad. the camera work and specially the cinematography i thought were very much thailand. (who is DOP? australian too? or thai?)

of special note is the audio, the jingle in particular. it's very well done. the jingle production had it exactly where it needs to be.

first of all, who knows how an adult angel should sound like and in song? we know how angels look like (well at least we think we do), we have seen a lot of pictures of angels done by humans, so we know what to expect. but singing adult angels? we have heard God speak in movies (low voice, reverb, slow, male, a fat male, and old) but not angels. we have an idea of cherubs singing but not an adult female angel. i thought the singing voice in the ad and more importantly the effects applied to it to make it sound like an angel singing was just right. it does sound heavenly.

i keep saying "just right" because this kind of production you can over do or under perform. that singing voice of an angel or heavenly singing in the jingle can sound like the chipmunks or worse a computer robot. the angel and the face just went extremely well together. i think a lot of the appeal of this ad comes from that - it's believability. what we see and hear in that ad, matches our expectations of angels and heaven.

i think over-all this ad has excellent production values, except for one item - the wings of the angel.


i don't think this ad got the wings of the angel right. i also do not think it was easy at all. my bet is that of all the items in the ad, a lot of pre-production meeting time was spent discussing the wings of the angel. there are two types of wings here - the real one like the props on the left and the CG wings. i bet a lot of grief and time were spent on these. i also won't be surprised if a lot of samples of the prop wings have been developed and discarded.

but having said that, i don't think they got it right.

here is where the difficulty is - no human has actually seen the wings of a real angel. we can only use drawings and paintings of angels with wings as references.

this will sound silly, but for me i thought the wings looked obviously fake in the ad. and i think i know why - the wing renditions in that ad, both prop and CG were wings for a cherub, not for a full grown angel. the feathers they used there were underdeveloped, too short and too small. it looks like the adult angel grew tall physically and big but the wings remained retarded, fit for a cherub.

also part of the problem is that the CG rendition of the wings were inconsistent, they did not look the same in all sequences. it looked like not one CG artist rendered all the wings in the ad but several artists did, thus the inconsistency in style and concept. they tried to hide the inconsistencies by blurring them but they still showed.

the wings didn't look majestic at all. to me the biggest disappointment was in that scene where the angel gets up and fully spreads her wings to prepare to fly to earth. they should have spent a lot of time and effort to make that a truly magnificent shot but not enough was done. all we saw was the wings fully spread but it wasn't awesome.

i'm sure the ad agency and director used a lot of references for the wings. but for me, i would have used the paintings of the masters and those we see in religious stampitas on how best to render the wings of an angel.

and, i'm very serious about this, i would have used the victorria's secret (yup the lingerie company) annual fashion show of their lingerie line where they started this trend of attaching wings to their models while in the skimpiest bras and panties. specially during the first three fashion shows using wings, those were the best wings i have seen on VS models. the wings they have in that fashion are exactly how they are drawn in paintings - shape and texture included. i swear, i was looking at the wings when i watch those fashion shows!





blogs on this coke ad:

http://creepygerry.blogspot.com/

http://www.cokeangel.blogspot.com/

to be continued......