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Coke launches new ads

NEW YORK — The charge: Get people excited about the Coke brand again.

The result: A new global advertising campaign called "Welcome to the Coke Side of Life," which is debuting this week in the United States.

The company kicked off the program Thursday night at a swank ballroom here, decorated with modern red sofas and colorful pop-art images from the campaign.

The campaign highlights the iconic shape of an old-fashioned Coke bottle, but adds modern graphics. In one billboard, there's a bottle, with liquid shooting out. The twist is that the liquid is a graphic featuring music notes.

Getting Americans excited about Coke is not an easy task. Sales volume of Coke Classic fell 2 percent last year in the United States. At the same time, sales volume of all carbonated soft drinks, including regular and diet drinks, declined in 2005 for the first time in at least 20 years, according to trade publication Beverage Digest.

Generally, consumers are becoming more interested in non-carbonated drinks like bottled water and sports drinks. Coke must balance putting resources into these new categories, while also staying focused on its core product. It has been a long time since the company — which had successful slogans like "I'd like to buy the world a Coke" and "Have a Coke and smile" in the '70s and '80s — created Coke advertising that struck a meaningful chord with U.S. consumers.

The new campaign features commercials that are supposed to make people feel happy and uplifted. In one, a boy is drinking a Coke and riding his bicycle through a parade, which includes people of all different races and backgrounds celebrating together. When he finishes the Coke, the parade disappears, leaving the viewer to wonder whether the utopia was real at all.

Coke is also going digital, offering performances by R&B artist Ne-Yo that fans can e-mail to friends from the Web site www.stagesidetv.com. The performances are framed by a Coke graphic.

Thursday's launch is the culmination of a long process started by CEO Neville Isdell. The idea has been to create one central message, which plays to the iconic nature of the brand, that can be localized for specific markets. In the past, Coke has tended to have completely different advertising for each market.

Isdell has allocated an additional $400 million annually to marketing and innovation, some of which is being spent on this global effort.

Coke announced in October that Portland, Ore.-based advertising agency Wieden and Kennedy, best known for its work with Nike, had won the account. In December at an analyst meeting, Coke executives introduced the "Welcome to the Coke Side of Life" tagline.

The campaign is starting in the United States and will appear more broadly after the World Cup ends in July, since Coke has created a lot of advertising specifically for that event around the world. Though sales of Coke are slipping in the United States, the drink is still enjoying good growth in some other parts of the world, including Russia and China.

Despite the hoopla, the U.S. campaign is not entirely new. It is an extension of a campaign that started in the United States on New Year's Eve, also created by Wieden and Kennedy. Some of those commercials will continue to air, including an upclose view of Coke being poured over vanilla ice cream, followed by the line, "You had a good run, root beer."

The first commercials focused on "romancing the product," said Katie Bayne, senior vice president of Coca-Cola brands for the company's North America division. The next phase, she said, is about celebrating the positive experiences that people have while drinking Coke.

Esther Lee, chief creative officer for marketing, strategy and innovation, puts it another way.

"The mission," she said, "is to make Coke more important to people."

Caroline Wilbert writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.