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Cola: The Fun Side, and the Dark Side

By Rain Noe - June 6, 2014

in Object Culture

What an era we live in, where both advertising agencies and regular consumers are able to program the television that is YouTube. It's a far cry from Don Draper's day, where information on products came primarily from those trying to sell them to you.

Here's a good example of the modern-day situation. First up we have a cheery ad spot for Coke by Ogilvy & Mather China, which starts off with the nice thought "What if empty Coke bottles were never thrown away?" To that end, the campaign imagines sixteen different plastic widgets that can be screwed onto empty bottles, theoretically prolonging their lives by turning them into everything from squirtguns to pencil sharpeners:

On the other side of the market coin, we've got the much-beloved YouTuber CrazyRussianHacker, whose endearingly thick accent and wacky experiments have garned 1.8 million subscribers. In his latest video—which had 4.6 million hits at press time and counting—he asks "What will happen if you boil Coke?" The labels on the bottles are removed, so arguably this could be any cola, but Jeez Louise is this disturbing:

He keeps referring to that disgusting tar as "sugar," which makes this American wonder: Is it only in the 'States, with our corn subsidies, where soda is made with high-fructose corn syrup? Can any of our Russian readers tell us what the sweetening ingredient is in you guys's cola?

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Alex

10 years ago

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When I lived Guatemala and then worked in Tanzania, many Coke products did come in glass bottles, has that stopped? Or was this never the case in places like Vietnam?
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Scott

10 years ago

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Roy- That's exactly right, and what's worse is they used to have a business model where every local bottling company would ship the product in glass bottles that were returned after use, washed, and refilled. They deliberately threw that away in favor of cans, and later, plastic bottles. Adding more plastic to turn a plastic bottle into a useless piece of junk is no better than shredding it and recycling the plastic.
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Rafael Morgan

10 years ago

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I totally agree with Roy...This is beyond cynical.

Please, Coca-Cola, stop pretending you care about the environment. Instead, why don't you go back to using glass returnable bottles, like you did when I was a kid? Or why don't you offer benefits for people to return their plastic bottles to you, so you can recycle them yourselves?

Please, Coke, stop pretending you care about people. Instead, why don't you stop using your customers as guinea-pigs to experiment with all sorts of dubious chemicals just to find out that they cause cancer and other diseases after a few years? Or why don't you invest your money on elaborating healthy soft-drinks?

Anyway, I believe that in the future all companies will be held responsible to process and recycle both their products and packages. This thing of making everything disposable is one of the most stupid and illogical things ever invented.

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Roy

10 years ago

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I think it's the third or fourth time I've seen this so called "Green awareness" and recycling idea from CCC in the past week on the net. I think it's one of the MOST CYNICAL IDEAS EVER! If the coca-cola company really wanted to make a change, they would have launched a business model NOT BASED ON DISPOSABLE BOTTLES. But again, they just like to take the easy way and go for PR and display cool designed ideas instead of attacking what is really the problem: CCC is a bottled drink company and NOT a beverage company for most of its business. It's exactly why they don't like ideas like SODA STREAM or other environmental conscience initiatives. It reminds me of this campaign they had recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlA9tXYxD8g . If they care so much about hard working, poor people, why not GIVE them free calls or even free drinks?? You'll be the judge!
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w

10 years ago

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The Crazy Russian Hacker is Taras Kulakov and he lives in Asheville, NC.
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Daniel

10 years ago

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The second part of this post is bordering on fear mongering.

You can boil down nearly any dark substance that has sugar in it (doesn't matter what plant the glucose/fructose/sucrose is derived from), and it will eventually turn to a dark sticky substance. In fact, it doesn't even need to be that dark. Through a process known as caramelization, any sugary substance will eventually turn dark and tar-like, if cooked long enough.

Soft drinks are unhealthy enough without hinting that they're dangerous simply because you can boil them down to something that looks icky. We as designers can appeal to people's emotions through honest and sincere means without having to rely on the shock value of something like this.
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