Coca-Cola, Amazon, Cadbury – 5 things that mattered this week and why

Diet Coke overhaul

Coca-Cola turns its attention to Diet Coke

Having claimed big success with its Coca-Cola Zero Sugar rebrand, Coke is now turning its attention to the Diet Coke brand promising “exciting things” for the brand in the UK following an overhaul in the US.

Despite not being very forthcoming about plans for the UK, the brand refresh does signify a direct desire to appeal to health-conscious millennials. And with the sugar-tax set to come into force in April, the push would be timely.

The US brand refresh includes new packaging, a new campaign and four new flavours. Zesty blood orange and feisty cherry are among the new tastes. If these don’t spark much excitement hold your scepticism as the 10,000 Americans they surveyed surely can’t be wrong.

READ MORE: Coca-Cola preps Diet Coke overhaul in the UK to boost sales

Cadbury swaps joy for kindness in new marketing strategy

Despite promising to deliver joy for 10 years, Cadbury’s has ditched its ‘Free the Joy’ campaign instead focusing on moments of “kindness and generosity”.

The chocolate company launched its Joy positioning in 2012 but has slowly been distancing itself from it ever since. In 2014, it ended the communication platform Joyville, following that two years later by dropping the strapline ‘Free the Joy’ to instead showcase moments of joy. Now, after six years, it has decided to end the focus on joy altogether.

The change will be implemented across the Cadbury portfolio but is starting with the Dairy Milk brand and includes a new advert that launches tomorrow (13 January).

READ MORE: Cadbury ditches joy positioning after six years to go ‘back to brand roots’

Amazon makes a big push into ad tech

Amazon has made no secret of its desire to become a bigger player in the digital ad space. Barely thought of a year ago, it has since piqued the interest of a number of marketers, as well as WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell, looking for an alternative to the Facebook and Google duopoly.

With that in mind, Amazon made a big push in Europe this week, bringing its Transparent Ad Marketplace (or TAM) to the region after its launch in the US a little over a year ago. Amazon hopes that its cloud-based service will attract publishers because it should mean faster load times – the bidding happens on Amazon’s servers rather than on a publisher’s website meaning less code and more speed.

Amazon still accounts for just a tiny fraction of the digital ad market but it is growing and growing fast. And we all now what typically happens when Amazon turns its attention to a new market – especially one where it already has the scale and data to compete.

READ MORE: Amazon plots digital ad push with ad tech launch

The Christmas winners and losers

After all the excitement about the Christmas ad campaigns, it’s now time to see which retailers actually had a successful festive season and which did not. Obvious winners would seem to be Next, Morrisons and Tesco, all of which posted positive numbers. Meanwhile Debenhams, House of Fraser and Mothercare were forced to issue profit warnings.

Over at John Lewis, it was another good year for sales, with boss Paula Nickolds crediting the “talkability” of its Moz the monster campaign and suggesting the focus on “thoughtful giving” is here to stay. But while Marks & Spencer’s boss hailed the Paddington campaign as “brilliant”, its sales were a little more mixed with a warm October ruining its hopes of positive like-for-likes in clothing and food sales disappointing.

READ MORE: John Lewis backs ‘thoughtful giving’ Christmas message despite signs of fatigue

L’Oréal launches its first ever wearable device

L’Oréal has long had a reputation for showing off its technical and scientific prowess at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Last year, the French beauty giant launched a “connected” brush, which provides hair analysis and customised product recommendations.

This time around it has brought out its first ever wearable device. UV Sense looks to help consumers keep track of how much sunlight users are exposed to – and encourage them to protect themselves against harmful UV rays.

It works like this: UV Sense is less than 2mm thick and is designed to be worn on the thumbnail. It measures individual UV exposure and provides real time information, stores up to three months’ worth of data and shows trends of exposure over time.

Through an accompanying mobile app, wearers can access information indicating when they should be mindful of their UV exposure and therefore apply more sunscreen or seek out the shade.

L’Oréal describes the device as “the future of wearables”, due to its “organic” nature. But as the device is smaller than an M&M, just make sure you don’t lose it.

READ MORE: L’Oréal moves into wearables for the first time with UV light tracking device

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