MusicTravelWrite

Smile! Coke is Coming!

I’m not sure how much this is being advertised on TV, but a recent Matador article brought it to my attention. Because of the hilarity in which writer Tom Gates presented this new Coca-Cola project, at first I just laughed. But now, days later, I’m irked. Really irked.

The project? Coca-Cola is sending a 3-member team of “Happiness Ambassadors” on an “unprecedented journey” around the world to “seek and share the optimism and happiness of Coca-Cola from Aruba to Zimbabwe and everywhere in between.”

While those are direct quotes from Coke’s website, please feel free to imagine me curling my fingers in the air like quotations, words dripping with sarcasm as I repeat them.

There are currently three teams, and the public can vote for which team they want to see whisked away on this adventure. The winning team will tweet, blog, YouTube, and Flickr their way across the globe, a desperate attempt to stay in touch with the young, hip whippersnappers that are as foreign to Coke execs as…well, Twitter, blogs, YouTube, and Flickr.

How does this bug Michelle? Let us count the ways.

1. As someone who has lived in and visited third world countries, I find it offensive that a billion dollar company is using the idea of “spreading happiness” to suffering people as nothing more than a marketing strategy to sell their product. Tom said it best: “How exactly are you going to make a person with no water smile? Oh right, you’ll hand them a Coke.”
2. The team names are Team WOW!, Team The Mix, and Team Sha-ba-ba-doo. And you can get to know them, although I highly recommend you don’t, through these videos.
3. It could even fail as an advertising strategy, because the entire expedition will last a year – who’s going to care near the end when they’re “wandering the planet Tweeting about neato waterfalls to a captive audience of ten Coke interns?” (Tom again. He’s much funnier than me.)
4. What audience are they targeting here? Travelers? Not this one. The whippersnappers? Um, they can smell “trying to be hip” a mile away.
5. Sha-ba-ba-doo. I mean, come on.

Maybe I’m being overly critical. Maybe the posts and tweets these kids share will go beyond a sunshiney picture of a smiling child in Ghana holding a bottle of Coke, her starving baby brother conveniently outside the shot. Maybe other cultures that have existed for hundreds of years won’t be portrayed in Epcot-like fashion. Maybe the Happiness Ambassadors will share the actual heart-wrenching experiences and sights that are unavoidable during a year-long world trek.

Either way, I’m waiting for Pepsi to counterattack with a mission to reunite Korea via group hugs.