Ordinary Advertising

The soft drink Sprite is one of my favorite examples of what can happen to a brand when its stewards decide to invest in some extraordinary advertising. For those of you not familiar with the story, I’ll quickly summarize it here.

Sprite is The Coca-Cola Company’s version of 7-Up and for years it languished in the 11th or 12th slot in terms of sales volume. It wasn’t like it had distribution problems, not with Coke’s muscle behind it. And it wasn’t like it didn’t spend money on advertising. Who can forget (or should I say, remember) “I like the Sprite in you?” Or the half lemon half lime piece of fruit they oh, so cleverly dubbed a “limon?” Not surprisingly, this ordinary stuff didn’t do beans for Sprite sales.

But then in the 90s, Lee Garfinkel arrived at the agency that handled Sprite and a new campaign was developed: the “obey your thirst” work. And did it ever.

The ads were clever, amusing, irreverent and better yet, completely mocking of conventional advertising approaches. But best of all, Sprite sales went crazy. So much so that in a fairly short period of time it moved up to the 4th position in volume. A feat that in the soft drink industry is right up there with “able to leap tall buildings in a single bound” in terms of probability. And for the five or six years following Sprite did swell.

Of course eventually this sales trajectory eased off and the brain trust at Sprite turned to the marketing profession’s favorite “door #2″, a new campaign, and when that didn’t pan out, it was on to “door #3″, a new agency. And whatever that agency did couldn’t have been too extraordinary because Sprite drifted off my (and I have to believe a lot of other people’s) radar screen ages ago. Until last night that is.

Last night I saw a TV spot for Sprite that truly went right past the low end of the bell curve that represents extraordinary advertising, past the big bulge that represents ordinary advertising and landed smack dab at the other end of the bell, i.e. truly attrocious advertising.

Shot in that jerky, quick-cut, Dutch-angled, color-desaturated style that is the international symbol for “hip advertising to follow”, the spot opens with a title which informs the viewer that what he or she is about to see is “sublimonal advertising.” Now that alone should have been enough to send me flying across the room in search of the remote. But frankly, I was frozen in mute horror. Because the next thing I saw was two sumo wrestlers, one colored green and the other yellow, hurtling toward each other with the smacking of distended bellies a predictable outcome. Predictable and repugnant, and not in that order. And finally, the spot concluded with a brief flashing of the word “obey.” Not “obey your thirst” just “obey” as in do what the people spending a fortune on this crap want you to do, I guess.

It’s almost as if some brand team (I shudder to think it was the agency) decided that “if we take a bit of that ‘obey’ thing that worked so well and put it in a Cuisinart with the old ‘limon’ gag and shoot it real cool, we should have a winner on our hands…”

Yeah, well I guess you’ve got something on your hands, but most people usually handle it with toilet paper. Instead, what we have here is a possible explanation for why Warren Buffett resigned from Coke’s board last year. Coca-Cola just doesn’t get it. And from the looks of things, they’re a long way from ever getting it. Unless they can figure out a way to install bolts in Robert Woodruff’s neck and go looking for a lightning strike.