I think this advert is quite successful in its purpose, it advertises Coke as the thing to be drinking, as a thing of desire as the thing that has been missing from your hand because it has been in our culture for so long it is almost an extension of it.
The second advert I am going to analyse is from a different period of time than the first one. This one was from 1989, which is seven years after the previous advert I have analysed. However a lot of the same themes run throughout them.
In this advert there is a man and a woman outside a traditional American car. The man is lifting the woman up into the air, in the background there is a city and on the right there is a bridge.
I think the city in the background is San Francisco because the bridge on the right of the poster looks like the Golden gate bridge. The car behind the people is a traditional American car. I think this links in with “Coca-Cola” being the traditional American soft drink. The car from the poster seems to be a Cadillac or a Chevrolet these are both traditional American car manufacturers.
The people in the advert are in the same category as the woman in the other advert. To make the product look better they get attractive young healthy people to appear on them. They do this because if they have an attractive woman on an advert the women aspire to be like them and the men aspire to be with them. The woman on the poster is wearing a white dress that is being blown slightly by the wind and this makes it look very elegant. The woman is holding up a bottle of Coke and her arm goes into the red banner with the slogan in the top. I think the subliminal message from this is that Coke is connected to the people, it’s a peoples company and it makes it seem as if the woman is a part of this grand “Coca-Cola” tradition.
Overall I think this poster achieves its goal which is to advertise “Coca-Cola” as something of desire to the younger generations, who in the future will be the major consumers.
The third poster is from the same advertising campaign as the last one. I chose to analyse this one because it has one distinct difference from the other two. This one has a man as the main focus whereas in the others the focus was on women.
In this poster there is a man lying down wearing a pair of jeans and no top, he’s holding a bottle of Coke in his hand and he appears to be lying on the bonnet of a car, he also has a portable stereo near his head.
In this poster most of it is taken up by the man who is lying down, again as in the other posters the focus is a healthy and attractive man. He appears to be carefree just lying on his car listening to music and drinking a Coke. He’s what men want to be and who women want to be with. People on their way to work drive past the posters on billboards and they see the relaxed man he appears to have no job and he doesn’t care. Then they notice that it is Coke that’s being advertised. Then without realizing it they start to subconsciously believe that they can become like them by buying and drinking Coke.
There is a lot of connotation in this advert for example the man on the car has golden tanned skin and linking to desire because everyone wants to be tanned and this again make people desire Coke. Another subliminal message in this poster is the hot day. The man is sweating, everything looks hot and dusty this also makes you want to drink “Coca-Cola”.
As is the second poster I analysed, the person mergers into the banner, again creating the feeling that they are part of the product. In a sense they are, they are part of “Coca-Cola’s” grand image of Coke being youthful and being ‘cool’.
I think this poster is probably the most successful of the three I have analysed it seems to appeal more to me because of the notion of being carefree. The others have other subliminal messages which may affect other people more strongly than they affected me. This has always been the strength of Coke’s advertising, its diversity and its success at being able to persuade wide varieties of people, because everyone sees something different the advertisements, everyone has a different way of viewing things.
Television Advertisements
I am going to analyse and compare two different television advertisements the first was broadcast in 1971 and is one of the most popular adverts ever made. This advert is known as the “Hilltop” advert which wanted to “teach the world to sing”.
“I’d like to teach the world to sing” (1971)
Originally “I’d like to teach the world to sing” was not a success when it was first released on the radio as a jingle, so much so it even got hate mail. However after the disappointment of the radio advert the producer tried to persuade the “Coca-Cola” executives to let him create a television commercial which included the song. The “Coca-Cola” executives said “Yes” and they gave him $500,000 which made it the most expensive advert ever made at the time. Originally it was set to be filmed in Britain with a thousand children on a hillside in Cornwall. However they were forced to film it in Italy instead because of the weather. Also the amount of children had to be cut down. When the advert was finally put on television it became the first ever advert to receive over 100,000 letters of fan mail all saying the same thing, they wanted a single. “Coca-Cola” agreed to this and “I’d like to teach the world to sing” became the Christmas number one.
The ‘Hilltop’ advert is set in southern Italy on a hill. There are about four hundred people standing singing a song these are the lyrics:
I'd like to buy the world a home
And furnish it with love
Grow apple trees and honey bees
And snow white turtle doves.
Chorus:
I'd like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
I'd like to buy the world a Coke
And keep it company
It's the real thing.
Chorus 2:
What the world wants today
“Coca-Cola”
Is the real thing
When listening to the advert the lyrics start to overlap in the second chorus with the first verse. However you can hear the words “Coca-Cola” and Coke clearly and frequently. It even manages to blend the first line and the penultimate line to create “I’d like to buy Coca-Cola” This advert is clever because it hooks the audience in by not mentioning the product until 25 seconds into it so the audience is left guessing what it could be advert for.
The opening shot of this advert is of a woman she is silhouetted against a beautiful blue sky the shot is a close up level shot. She starts singing on her own until in line three the camera pans out more people come into view and they join in singing with her. The next point at which more people join in is line seven. It is then that “Coca-Cola” is first mentioned thus finally telling the audience what this is an advertisement for, if they haven’t seen it before. When the advert finishes the “Coca-Cola” symbol appears on the screen and by now the camera is fully zoomed out into a high angle shot. The people are now just one big crowd on the lush green Italian hilltop. The crowd is made up of people from different cultures and countries. The subliminal message in this advert is that “Coca-Cola” can bring people from different closer together thus promoting world peace.
The lyrics of the song are very fitting for the time in which it was aired. In 1971 the hippy movement was still reasonably strong and the lyrics of the songs appealed to a lot of the hippy ideals-like world peace.
This advert is regarded by some top advertising agencies as one of the most successful in the history of television advertising and thirty three years on it is still remembered.
“You can’t beat the feeling” (1988)
The second advert I am going to analyse was from 1988 and was a new advertising campaign, "Can't Beat the Feeling," which aimed to show “Coca-Cola” as an integral and natural part of people's lives in everything from family to youthful fun, to a first date. The ads featured upbeat music and played broadly appealing themes such as music, love and family. The campaign was launched in nearly one hundred countries, marking the first ad campaign for “Coca-Cola” outside North America in six years.
This advert relies mainly on its upbeat, feel-good music and its link with youth.
This advert has many aspects to it. It has 23 scenes and only lasts 23 seconds so each scene lasts only on average 1 second. Most of the shots in the advert that contain people are mid-shots whereas the shots that contain the Coke bottle are extreme close-ups to make the bottle look bigger and more desirable. The bottles always have beads of condensation on them which if it was a hot day would really want to make you drink “Coca-Cola”. The view of the shots in this advert varies from one to the next however the majority of them are level shots. Between each shot there is no fading or dissolving, all the edits are clean cuts therefore moving swiftly from one shot to the next.
As I have already said sound plays a key role in this advert. It keeps the audiences attention and uses its fast pace, good rhythm and upbeat tone to liven up the advert. The song is very happy and cheerful this is achieved by having it in the major key. I have to say that I do not like the song in this advert because I think it is too “cheesy” but in the 1980’s when it was made it would have been quite popular. The song in this advert is sung by a woman, it is done as a voice over i.e. the viewer does not see the woman who sings the song in the advert. The song finishes on a perfect cadence so you can tell that it’s finished. The song has a gospel feel to it because of the way the backing singers come in.
Visually this advert uses a lot of advertising techniques as well. The advert commences with a shot of a black silhouette of a man in a disco up against a red background which links back to colours of the Coke logo and bottle this is a level mid-shot. The next scene is a close up of a piano which plays a glissando. This is when the music begins, this shot is a high angle shot. The next one is of a man at a train station drinking a bottle of Coke he looks very relaxed he’s just drinking a Coke and waiting for a train, he’s without a care in the world in the world. In the next shot there is a close up of three Coke bottles surrounded by ice. This is a level shot and you can see beads of condensation trickling down the bottles. Two very powerful advertising techniques were used in the next shot. They were ideal children and playing the heart strings. This scene has a small girl in a field full of yellow flowers dancing along to the music. I know this affects people because when we watched it in class all the girls made comments about how adorable the little girls was. This is how the advertisers intended people to react to this shot, it gives “Coca-Cola” a family image. The scene that comes next features a man serving coffee in a coffee shop while holding a bottle of Coke and dancing behind the bar, in this scene there is golden light coming through the window this is the connotation to wealth and luxury that feature so often in “Coca-Cola” adverts. The “Coca-Cola” colours are displayed once more in the next scene. In this next scene in which there are three dancers wearing red and black. This scene is immediately followed by a scene in which three Coke bottles do a similar dance by jiggling and shaking, this personification draws your attention to the Coke bottles which is good when a shot only lasts one second. In the following scene there is a business man dancing along to the music while he has head phones on and he carries a brief case in one hand and a bottle of Coke in the other. He looks very happy. I think the subliminal message in this shot is that Coke makes everyone happy, it doesn’t matter if you’re one of the cleaners in one of the later scenes or a well paid business man, the effect is the same. The third from last scene has three dancers in a disco. The dancers are wearing white and there are blue strip lights behind them. The penultimate shot is a close up of the Coke bottle just to remind the viewer what this is advertising. Then it cuts to a blond haired woman holding up a bottle of Coke near her head and the slogan appears saying “You Can’t Beat the Feeling” and the “Coca-Cola” logo appears.
This was a very popular advert when it was released in 1988 but now it seem quite out of date and its means of persuading the people to buy the product with that type of music doesn’t work that well anymore. “Coca-Cola” features a lot in this advert for example: Coca Cola is said after only five seconds and is said at least once every five seconds for the rest of the commercial. This is to make sure that the product is remembered by the viewer. Surveys have revealed that the majority of people remember adverts but forget the name of the product. A startling discovery was that a large number of people even associate the rival product with the commercial, so the name has to be remembered. But this does tend to be the case in a lot of American adverts they are more direct and more competitive than British commercials
Overall out of the two I much prefer the “I’d like to teach the world to sing” advert the main reason for me thinking so is it’s simply more entertaining than the slightly annoying “Can’t beat the feeling!” advert. The intentions of the two adverts were the same, to sell Coke, but they both went about them in different ways. “Can’t beat the feeling’s” approach was musical vignettes, with a parade of fleeting impressions; they were once fashionable but are now not. Entertaining perhaps, but now impotent at selling products. Whereas “I’d like to teach the world to sing’s” approach was more subtle. It seemed to be more like a British commercial than an American one because you don't get the feeling the product is being “shoved down your throat”. “I’d like to teach the world to sing” is better than “Can’t beat the feeling!” in almost every area, but what it really comes down to is which one would make you buy Coke the most?
