Coca-Cola to the rescue and McDonald’s goes to war: Your Marketing Week
At the end of every week, I look at the key stories, offering my view on what they mean for you and the industry. From Coca-Cola and McDonald’s signalling a return to marketing, to the virtues of zero-based budgeting, it’s been a busy week on Marketingweek.com. Here is my take.
Coke to the rescue
Coca-Cola was one of several UK companies emerging from darkness and back on to our screens, our shops and outdoor sites this week.
After pausing ad spend in April, it’s back with an ambitious campaign that seems to want to usher in a fairer society and save the hospitality sector from Armageddon. As I say, ambitious.
Featuring George the Poet, the spot encourages people to look upon lockdown as the beginning of a reprioritisation of what’s important. To carry the best of what they have realised is right and righteous over the past few months into a post pandemic world. Or something.
It’s a return to Coke as conduit to a utopian vision of what human-kind can be. Think ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing’ remixed for 2020.
Maybe it captures an underlying sense the world is changing but it does feel reflective of the kinds of conversations being had in homes in the metropolitan bubble in the haze of early lockdown. That we were about to enter a period underscored by a more caring kind of capitalism.
No matter, the real point, and necessity of this campaign, is its support for the hospitality sector. Separate activity is aimed at stimulating demand in bars, restaurants and cafes. This isn’t benevolence. Coke was hit hard by lockdown and now the reticence of people to return to these places. It needs them to survive for it to thrive. This is a high stakes return for Coke.