"Ah, this is Pam H. from Newton, Massachusetts, and I resent you saying that everything is going to be O.K. You don't know anything about my life. You don't know what I've been through in the last month. I really resent it. I'm tired of you people trying to tell me things that you don't have any idea about. I resent it. ((Click! ))"
-- Message left on the 800 line set up to promote OK soda
BELIEVE IT OR NOT, COCA-Cola actually paid its advertising agency to plant that message on a hotline for its newest product. But then, trashing its own claims is just part of the campaign for OK soda, a bubbly, mildly fruity drink for teenagers and young adults that Coke hopes will be its next blockbuster beverage and that the company is testing in nine cities from Boston to Seattle. With OK's deliberately drab cans and pseudo-Zen profundities ("What's the point of OK soda? Well, what's the point of anything?"), Coke hopes to capture a generation that is both anxious about its adult-size problems and inoculated against pitches from having grown up with television jingles at breakfast.
Of course, little is completely new in this marketing strategy. Getting messages across to audiences that don't fully realize they are receiving them is as old as the subliminal spots for popcorn and soda that advertisers flashed on movie screens in the 1950s. More recently, for instance, mtv blended commercials for a Pizza Hut delivery service with its regular programming by showing pizzas arriving by horseback or out of the ocean for its video jockeys.
What distinguishes Coke's campaign is that few of the global companies pursuing teenagers these days have been so elaborately slick in inventing ways to be unslick. Few, in other words, have gone to such great lengths to convince teens that the corporate voice is sincere. "You have to first and foremost acknowledge that you are marketing," says Brian Lanahan, manager of special projects for Coke's marketing division. Today's teens are "very versed in participating in the commercial world," he adds. "Probably their main area of power is as a consumer."
Which is exactly what attracts Coca-Cola and other consumer firms to teens in the first place. American adolescents last year spent as much as $89 billion on the latest trends in food, clothing, videos, music and, of course, soda; teens spent more than $3 billion of their own money on soft drinks alone. Yet America's 27.8 million teenagers are merely the vanguard of a global 12-to-20 market that numbers nearly 1 billion youths. Moreover, this mass of teens, particularly in the developing nations of Asia and Latin America, are far more influenced by U.S. products and popular culture than by what their own countries have to offer.
More than their global peers, however, American teenagers share an inveterate cynicism about corporate messages. This explains why in the OK campaign, Coke has set up an 800 number to let drinkers sound off about the beverage, and thereby define it for themselves. In another understated, low- tech move, the company is mailing out chain letters in target markets that mock the outlandish claims that companies often make for their products.