Nothing Magical About This

Recently, Coca-Cola launched a new ad campaign entitled “Real Magic” as part of a new global brand platform. This new brand platform is a part of Coca-Cola’s first brand refresh since 2016. Coming out of the pandemic sales slump, a $4 billion global creative and media agency review was invested to create a new visual identity.

“Real Magic is not simply a tagline or a one-off campaign: It is a long-term brand philosophy and belief that will drive and guide marketing and communications across the Coca-Cola trademark,” Manolo Arroyo, chief marketing officer for The Coca-Cola Company, said in a press statement. A major part of this new messaging was the launch of the campaign “One Coke Away From Each Other.” This short film features online gaming, Twitch streaming, as well as Esports players. The strong emphasis on “gaming” is not without controversy, currently the video on Youtube has 73,000 dislikes compared to 6,000 likes. If you have not gotten the chance to watch this strange marriage of CGI, Coca-Cola, and gaming I highly recommend you judge for yourself: https://youtu.be/_BqjFOXuCpU. 

I believe that an ad like this one is a good opportunity to reflect on client and agency relationships. Clearly Coca-Cola wanted to target people that played video games in their ad. Part of this ad campaign included a code hunt where fans who find the codes can win prizes such as playing with celebrity gamers, or earning “bits,” which is a virtual good used to show support to Twitch streamers. 

The ad agency was tasked with creating a gaming ad that reinforced Coca-Cola's new identity of harmony and human connection. Ideals like this are fine, but the advertisement comes across as very out of touch, because the concepts of harmony and peace shown make no sense. The ad shows a group of people playing a video game, only for all of the in-game characters to throw down their weapons and join together peacefully. Why would anyone playing a video game want that to happen? For an advertisement trying to connect to a certain demographic, it completely misses the mark. World peace being achieved in a video game is a strange message, and is the exact opposite of what video games are about. Video games are an outlet for some people to have fun, and play with their friends. Watching virtual characters achieve world peace has nothing to do with what gaming is, and the flimsy connection between that and a type of fountain drink make for a bad advertisement.