CAN YOU WAIT? CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW
The Cunard Line Limited boasted one of the cruise industry’s most storied pasts, having carried the Royal Mail across the Atlantic for England before building one of the grandest and most respected fleets of passenger ships during the early twentieth century. The rise of passenger aircraft, however, all but eliminated the demand for transatlantic ocean travel, and by the turn of the millennium Cunard had a fleet of two ships, only one of which continued to travel the onceprominent route between North America and Great Britain. The world’s largest cruise-ship company, Carnival Corporation, purchased Cunard in 1998; later that year Cunard announced its plan to construct what would be the largest and most luxurious passenger ship of its time, the Queen Mary 2. The ship was slated to make regular transatlantic voyages, which would be evocative of the golden age of ocean travel, as well as select Caribbean, South American, and New England cruises. To build awareness about the new ship preparatory to its January 2004 maiden voyage, Cunard enlisted the New York office of ad agency TBWA\Chiat\Day to helm a marketing campaign for 2003.
The campaign, budgeted at an estimated $8 million, began in spring 2003, with the intent of helping Cunard achieve full booking of Queen Mary 2 ’s maiden voyage and 60 percent booking on the rest of the ship’s 2004 trips. Because construction of the ship was still underway, TBWA\Chiat\Day could not showcase the product itself, so the campaign instead conveyed the idea that a Queen Mary 2 voyage was an event worthy of intense anticipation. Print ads used images of overdressed women in everyday situations, such as a stylish mother serving her children breakfast while wearing a ball gown, together with the ‘‘Can You Wait?’’ tagline. To enhance the ship’s upscale allure, the brand names of luxury products and services to be featured on the Queen Mary 2 itself were included in the ads’ copy.
The Queen Mary 2 sold out its berths by July 2003, approximately four months after the campaign began, and the occupancy goals for the ship’s entire 2004 schedule of voyages were exceeded shortly thereafter. The campaign won a Gold EFFIE Award in 2004.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The Cunard Line was established in 1839 as a transatlantic carrier of the Royal Mail from Britain to Canada and the United States, and by the early twentieth century it had expanded to become one of the world’s premier shipping lines. Cunard lost 22 ships during World War I, including the Lusitania, whose sinking by German U-boats while crossing from New York to Liverpool contributed to America’s entrance into the conflict. Transatlantic shipping’s golden age came in the 1920s and 1930s, and Cunard remained a major player in the industry, employing the well-known marketing tagline ‘‘Getting There Is Half the Fun’’ during those years. In 1934 Cunard’s Queen Mary became the first vessel ever launched by a member of the British royal family, Her Majesty Queen Mary (wife of the then-reigning king, George V), and the Queen Elizabeth was unveiled in 1938, named for Queen Elizabeth, wife of King George VI, who had assumed the throne. Winston Churchill credited his country’s enlistment of these ships during World War II with shortening the conflict by at least a year. By the 1950s Cunard carried one-third of all passengers crossing the Atlantic, but at the end of that decade commercial passenger jets began making the transatlantic journey. Thus began the steady erosion of transatlantic boat travel until, by the late twentieth century, the practice seemed part of history. Though Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth 2, which was introduced in 1969, continued to make transatlantic voyages, the company went through several changes of ownership and struggled to reinvent itself for a new age. Cunard was purchased in 1998 by cruise-ship giant Carnival, which hoped to leverage the brand’s rich legacy and reputation for luxury in a bid to return the venerable line to profitability. Among the centerpieces of Carnival’s attempt to revive Cunard was the building of the largest and most luxurious passenger ship in existence, the Queen Mary 2, to take over the Queen Elizabeth 2 ’s transatlantic route in addition to making Caribbean voyages. Slated to make its maiden voyage in late 2003, the Queen Mary 2 was intended to appeal to nostalgia for the golden age of transatlantic ship travel while also updating the experience to suit the expectations of modern luxury vacationers. Not only was the Queen Mary 2 being prepared, at great expense, to travel a route that was nearly obsolete, but its construction also coincided with a sharp downturn in luxury travel as a result of a slowing U.S. economy and fears regarding terrorism. Complicating Cunard’s new agenda even further was the fact of serious overcapacity within the cruise industry. After years of consistent fleet enlargement (plans largely put into place before the economic downturn), in the early 2000s cruise lines found themselves forced to cut fares dramatically to attract passengers.
This was not, however, an option for the Queen
Mary 2, which was billed as the jewel not just of Cunard’s fleet but of the entire cruise industry.

TARGET MARKET
Because the Queen Mary 2 represented an occupancy increase of 60 percent for the Cunard fleet (which consisted of two other ships at the time), it was imperative that with the new campaign TBWA\Chiat\Day expand Cunard’s target market not just for the initial months after the ship’s christening but also in the long run. The agency sought out these new customers among wealthy, status-conscious Americans who already owned and had experienced many of the things they wanted in life. Such people, the agency deduced, had traveled widely and frequently traveled outside the United States. Their travels were characterized by a need to take ever more exotic or impressive vacations, at least partly because of the bragging rights this gave them among others in their social class. Though jaded in many ways, this target group still sought out proximity to famous and prestigious people, brands, and experiences. Thanks to its upscale legacy, the Cunard brand had the potential to satisfy the traveling desires of this market, and Cunard augmented its brand strength by partnering with other upscale names, including Veuve Clicquot (the makers of a renowned champagne), Canyon Ranch (a luxury spa company), and Todd English (a Boston-based celebrity chef). This gathering of upscale brands, mentioned in the ads’ copy, was meant to work together with the idea of anticipation communicated by the ads’ imagery and tagline to make a Queen Mary 2 cruise alluring to the status-conscious target.
Cunard mixed traditional and modern in its choice of brand partners as well as in its onboard amenities—for instance, the Queen Mary 2 had a grand staircase and furnishings evocative of the stately ships of an earlier age, and each cabin was outfitted with a high-speed Internet connection. This blend of classic and cutting-edge was a further reflection of the target market’s desires and expectations. While Cunard specifically appealed to consumers’ desire to step back in time to a supposedly more elegant and ceremonious age, these consumers did not want to sacrifice the comfort and convenience available to them in the present.

HOW BIG? HOW MUCH?
Upon entering service in January 2004, the Cunard Line’s Queen Mary 2 was the largest cruise ship ever built. It was almost as long as four football fields laid end to end, and its above-water height (accommodating 17 passenger decks) was the approximate equivalent of a 23-story building. Unsurprisingly, the Queen Mary 2, whose construction costs reached $800 million, was also the most expensive ship ever built.

COMPETITION
Cunard’s corporate parent, Carnival Corporation of Miami, owned many of the top cruise lines in American and European markets during this time, including Princess Cruises, the Holland America Line, and the world’s most popular and profitable cruise brand, Carnival Cruise Lines. Of these brands, Carnival Cruise Lines, which marketed comparatively affordable cruises to a mainstream audience, had by far the highest marketing profile. For decades prior to the turn of the millennium, Carnival had cultivated a positioning as ‘‘The Fun Ships,’’ and in 1985 it used this brand image in the firstever cruise-industry spots to appear on network television. The commercials featured celebrity spokesperson Kathie Lee Gifford (then Kathie Lee Johnson) singing about the Carnival experience. After moving away from this strategy in the late 1990s, Carnival experimented with reality-based advertising in the 2000s before returning to an emphasis on its ‘‘Fun Ship’’ identity. The world’s second-largest cruise company, Miamibased Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., was responsible for perhaps the most noteworthy cruise-industry advertising campaign of the early 2000s. The company offered trips to the Caribbean as well as to Alaska, Europe, and elsewhere. Having indulged significantly in the fleet expansion characteristic of the cruise industry in the late 1990s, and with further expansion planned for the 2000s, Royal Caribbean’s namesake line, Royal Caribbean International, addressed the inevitable need to expand its target market by crafting a new and more vibrant brand image in a long-running campaign tagged ‘‘Get Out There.’’ In an attempt to change the popular notion that cruise vacations were for the elderly, the campaign’s TV spots employed fast-paced cutting between images of adventurous off-ship activities together with the highenergy Iggy Pop rock song ‘‘Lust for Life.’’ This repositioning was considered a success, and the average age of Royal Caribbean customers dropped substantially. The problem of industry overcapacity, however, remained.

MARKETING STRATEGY
‘‘Can You Wait?’’ was budgeted at approximately $8 million. The Queen Mary 2 ’s maiden voyage was firmly scheduled for January 2004 (the preliminary completion date of late 2003 having been revised during the ship’s construction); the marketing campaign accordingly debuted in spring 2003. Its central goals were to generate sufficient awareness to sell out the maiden voyage and to sell 60 percent of the berths for the Queen Mary 2’s entire 2004 schedule. In addition to the difficulties stemming from industry overcapacity and the waning taste for transatlantic ocean travel, TBWA\Chiat\Day faced the challenge of marketing a product that did not yet exist. Though the Queen Mary 2 promised to set an industry standard for grandeur and elegance, it was under construction during the campaign’s run and so could not be used to supply visual examples of that grandeur and elegance.
TBWA\Chiat\Day thus settled on anticipation as the campaign’s controlling theme. Building on the idea that vacationers enjoyed anticipating their travels as much as the travels themselves, the agency employed imagery and copy meant to stimulate desire for the experience of crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2 while allowing prospective travelers to imagine the exact nature of the experience for themselves. The resulting print ads ran in trade magazines as well as national consumer magazines owned by Conde´ Nast, including Gourmet, Vanity Fair, W, Bon Appe´tit, Architectural Digest, the New Yorker, and Conde´ Nast Traveler. The consumer ads each featured an image of a woman dramatically overdressed for her commonplace surroundings. One ad, for instance, showed a woman serving breakfast to her children while wearing a full-length ball gown. Another showed a husband and wife in bed, the husband shirtless under the bedcovers and the wife sleeping beside him in a ball gown and high heels. Copy included the ‘‘Can You Wait?’’ tagline, the brand names of Cunard’s luxury-product partners, and the Cunard and Queen Mary 2 logos. Together—and especially as buzz began to build about the Queen Mary 2 —these elements suggested the idea that a voyage on the new ship was an event worthy of anticipation of the highest degree.
As part of the marketing agreement that resulted in the exclusive placement of Queen Mary 2 ads in Conde´ Nast magazines, TBWA\Chiat\Day and the publisher designed promotional events geared to the readership of each title. The campaign also included direct-mail and online components in keeping with the overall theme.

OUTCOME
By July 2003 Cunard had sold all 2,620 berths for the Queen Mary 2 ’s January 2004 maiden voyage. This represented the earliest sellout for any voyage in Cunard’s long and storied history, as well as an industry-wide record for the number of berths sold before a ship’s construction had been completed. Bookings for all of 2004 substantially exceeded Cunard’s precampaign goals. Surveys involving readers of Architectural Digest, one of the publications in which the ‘‘Can You Wait?’’ ads ran, revealed that 69 percent of those surveyed recalled the Queen Mary 2 ads; according to the survey results the ads also ranked first among ads in the magazine for attracting and holding readers’ attention. Cunard’s own research supported these findings across the group of publications in which the ads ran. More than 50 percent of passengers booked for 2004 Queen Mary 2 vacations had not previously sailed on a Cunard ship. ‘‘Can You Wait?’’ was awarded a Gold EFFIE Award in 2004 in the Travel/Tourism/Destination category. The EFFIE Awards, one of the most prestigious events in the advertising industry, were hosted annually by the New York American Marketing Association.

PROTECT/CREATE WEALTH CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW
Although Conseco, Inc., an insurance and financial services company, had become large and successful through acquisitions, it had little name recognition even among agents working for its various units. In order to establish the Conseco name as a brand, the company hired the advertising agency Fallon McElligott, Inc. to develop a print campaign to run in trade publications, followed by a $15 million television campaign, ‘‘Protect/Create Wealth,’’ targeted toward consumers with household incomes between $25,000 and $75,000 per year. The consumer campaign, Conseco’s first-ever on television, began running in February 1998 on ESPN and during the CBS broadcast of the NCAA basketball tournament, after which it moved to cable television. In a departure from the warm, sentimental advertising of insurance companies in the past, the campaign used edgy humor to make the point that life did not always go as expected and that a person needed to be financially prepared for bad or good times, either by having insurance or a financial plan. The company followed up with a $5 million print campaign in April 1998. The ‘‘Protect/Create Wealth’’ campaign ended in December 1998.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Conseco was founded in 1979 as Security National of Indiana Corp. by Stephen C. Hilbert, a former encyclopedia salesman from Terre Haute. In 1982 the company made the first of many acquisitions that would be the key to its growth, and in 1983 the company changed its name to Conseco, Inc. According to the company’s annual report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on March 31, 1999, from 1982 through 1998 Conseco acquired 19 insurance groups. By January 1998 the company was a $36 billion entity that sold life and health insurance and annuities under 25 names, including Colonial Penn Life and Casualty, American Travellers Life, Bankers Life & Casualty, and Capitol American.
Despite the fact that Conseco had grown into one of the country’s largest life and health insurance companies, few knew the company name. According to company spokesperson Jim Rosensteele, ‘‘Our research showed that even agents currently doing business with a Conseco company have very low awareness of the Conseco name. For many years, we’ve been thought of as a collection of companies.’’ The company thus decided to develop the Conseco name as a brand. At the same time Conseco decided to diversify beyond insurance into the realm of financial services, and in 1997 the company began to market its own over-the-counter mutual funds. The following year, Conseco spent $6.5 billion to acquire Green Tree Financial Corp., which added home loans, credit cards, and home equity loans to its offerings.
Another reason to seek name recognition was Conseco’s need to begin growing from within by increasing the sales of the companies it had purchased. One market observer claimed that 1998 would be a ‘‘make-orbreak year’’ for Conseco, noting, ‘‘So far, they’ve built [success] on the bodies of a number of companies without a lot of brand recognition. They’re probably not going to have any significant acquisitions this year, so they’ve got to digest the acquisitions they’ve already made and show some internal growth.’’
Conseco was aware of the need to increase sales and in 1996 began to work on a new marketing plan. By January 1998 the company had a new logo, which featured a series of steps rising from the Conseco name, illustrating the company’s focus on performance. Conseco hired advertising agency Fallon McElligott to create a print campaign targeted toward the nation’s 190,000 independent insurance agents. The campaign emphasized Conseco’s financial success. One advertisement read, ‘‘Q: What do you call an insurance company that has an unyielding grasp on the bottom line? A: Your friend.’’ It went on to say, ‘‘We are unapologetically profitable . . .PERFORMANCE IS WHAT MATTERS.’’ Conseco set aside $10 million for the agent campaign, which ran in the Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, and Forbes, as well as in trade publications. The company then spent $15 million for a consumer campaign, its first-ever on television.

TARGET MARKET
Conseco’s consumer-oriented campaign sought to establish the company’s name as a brand for a diversity of services, including insurance and investments. In February 1999 American Banker described Conseco’s target segment as American households that earned $30,000 to $70,000 per year, rather than the very rich, saying that it was a ‘‘long-neglected segment of U.S. consumers.’’ Company founder Hilbert said that his goal was to make Conseco the ‘‘Wal-Mart of financial services.’’
The first spot ran on February 26, 1998, on ESPN and then ran on CBS during the NCAA basketball tournament in March 1998. ‘‘If you look at the crowd that watches college basketball, they are college-educated people. It’s an excellent target audience to reach,’’ said Sandy Deem, a spokesperson with First Union, a company that ran advertising during the 1999 tournament. College basketball viewers were reported to have higher salaries and more education than other sports fans. Conseco spokesperson Rosensteele said, ‘‘There’s nothing like the NCAA tournament to really build exposure with the audience we’re targeting. We really want to build brand awareness with both agents and consumers.’’ Rosensteele also acknowledged that Conseco had a special connection with college basketball, which ‘‘is very big here in Indiana.’’

FALLON MCELLIGOTT: FROM MINNEAPOLIS TO THE BIG APPLE
Minneapolis advertising agency Fallon McElligott opened a branch in New York in April 1995, and by September 1997 it had $120 million in billings. One major reason for its success, according to an article in Shoot, was the agency’s chairman, Andy Berlin, who had helped launch the San Francisco-based Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein in 1983.
In addition to Conseco, Fallon McElligott boasted a client list at the time that included Coca-Cola, Tidy Cat, the NBA, Conde Nast publications, the Washington Post, Metropolitan Health Care, the National Symphony Orchestra, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Bankers Trust Worldwide, and Bancomer, the largest bank in Mexico.
Berlin said that one thing setting the agency apart from others was that the creative people worked ‘‘unusually closely’’ with account planners while campaigns were being developed. According to Berlin, the agency was also structured with as few layers as possible and featured a very young and prolific group of creative talent.
Berlin believed that finding an ‘‘original voice’’ was the most important thing he contributed to Goodby, and he continued to hold that philosophy at Fallon McElligott. ‘‘The world doesn’t need another Young & Rubicam or another Ogilvy & Mather,’’ he said. ‘‘It needs fresh voices.’’

COMPETITION
According to an article in National Underwriter Life & Health on January 12, 1998, the insurance and financial services industries had just gone through a ‘‘watershed year—the year in which it became apparent that the life insurance industry was no longer able to stand apart from the fundamental restructuring occurring within the financial services industry.’’ One major development was the ‘‘unprecedented level of merger and acquisition activity in the financial services industry.’’ Significant mergers and acquisitions took place in the life and property/ casualty markets, as well as in the managed care and brokerage segments. In the life insurance market companies were driven to consolidate by the desire to expand their scale, volume, products, distribution, and expertise. In addition to Conseco, other companies using acquisitions to stay competitive included Aegon N.V., American General Corp., ING Groep N.V., Jefferson-Pilot Corp., and Lincoln National Corp.
‘‘From a fragmented industry composed of thousands of competitors we are being driven toward a concentrated financial services market with a few national-level players in each segment,’’ National Underwriter Life & Health reported. ‘‘Insurance companies that once specialized in a single line or market now face hulking competitors like Travelers-Salomon Brothers, G.E. Capital, Zurich-Kemper, and Morgan Stanley-Dean Witter, along with the likes of American General, Aegon USA, and ING.’’ Only three months later, in April 1998, Citicorp and Travelers Group Inc. announced that they were merging to form Citigroup Inc., ‘‘the world’s first supermarket for banking, insurance and financial services,’’ according to Reuters news service. The merger created a megacompany with $698 billion in assets.

MARKETING STRATEGY
Conseco’s $15 million television campaign aimed at consumers was part of a long-term strategy to establish the company as a brand name in order to engender greater customer loyalty and to enhance sales. This would allow the company to grow without relying as heavily on acquisitions as it had in the past. As reported in February 1998 in Adweek, the television campaign was launched with five commercials—three 30-second spots and two 15-second spots—that used storytelling to make the point that Conseco could provide a variety of financial services.
The 30-second spots explored negative themes, but with an upbeat twist at the end. Fallon McElligott used edgy humor in the commercials in order to set Conseco apart from other companies, which had traditionally used sentimentality or warmer humor. In one 30-second spot, ‘‘Grim Reaper,’’ a couple was relaxing at home when, unbeknownst to them, the Grim Reaper came to their front door. Before he could knock, a female Reaper appeared and lured him away by lifting her skirt to flash a bit of leg bone. The two ran off together, and the couple remained blissfully unaware of the close call. The voice-over said, ‘‘You never know when your number is going to be up. That’s why you need protection against the unexpected.’’ In another 30-second spot, ‘‘Italian Woman,’’ a woman was told that her man had been seen with another woman in a jewelry store. As she stomped to the store with a rolling pin in hand and a crowd in tow, the voice-over said, ‘‘Sometimes you need health insurance. Sometimes you need life insurance.’’ When she discovered that the ‘‘other woman’’ was actually a store clerk and that the man was buying her a ring, she dropped the rolling pin and the voice-over said, ‘‘And sometimes you need investments for the future.’’ The third 30-second spot, ‘‘Boxer,’’ explored similar bad news/good news themes, showing a young boxer being beaten up in the ring but telling the viewer that he had won a $2 million purse in the process. One of the 15-second spots simply showed a squirrel jumping from branch to branch in a tree, only to fall out of sight on his final leap. The narrator said, ‘‘You know the saying, ‘Look before you leap?’ Well, it’s especially true when you make financial decisions. So, maybe you should be talking to Conseco.’’ The tag line for the campaign was ‘‘Create wealth. Protect wealth. For life.’’
The campaign was designed to encourage consumers to use Conseco for a variety of financial services and to emphasize that things did not always go according to plan. ‘‘Life can go either way, and we want to show that Conseco is there,’’ said account supervisor Mary Ann Harris. The company was also interested in standing out from the crowd, particularly since it was a relatively late arrival in consumer marketing. The company and the advertising agency believed that the edgy approach was a welcome change from the messages of the past, that people were tired of ‘‘warm and fuzzy advertising’’ and were ‘‘ready to hear a different message.’’ Bill Schwab, a cocreator of the campaign with Fallon McElligott, remembered one member of a focus group member who said, ‘‘If I see one more insurance-company ad where some child is tugging at her mother’s skirt, I’ll throw up.’’
It was reported that Conseco planned to run 51 commercials on CBS during the NCAA tournament alone. In addition, the advertising appeared on such cable networks as ESPN, CNN, A&E, and the History Channel. Within weeks after the television advertising began, the Indianapolis Star reported that the Conseco name was gradually being used by the company’s subsidiaries and added to products, part of the move to publicize Conseco as a brand name. In April a $5 million print campaign followed in financial and news.

MUTUAL FUNDS PARTNER WITH SPORTS FOR MARKETING ADVANTAGE
At one time the business and sports worlds had little to do with each other, at least from a marketing standpoint. During the 1990s, however, both mutual funds and sports became increasingly popular among men and women of all ages with money to invest. A marketing match was thus created.
According to a July 18, 1999, article in the Arizona Republic, in 1998 financial firms spent an estimated $850 million on global sports advertising. Among other things mutual fund companies became high-profile sponsors of professional sports teams and athletic events. Stadiums and sports arenas were being named after financial companies, despite occasional fan protests. Conseco Field House, home of the Indianapolis Pacers, was just one example, along with Safeco Field in Seattle and the Philadelphia 76ers’ new venue, First Union Center.
‘‘Financial-services firms have been increasingly turning to professional sports to raise brand-name recognition,’’ according to Cerulli Associates, a Boston consulting firm. ‘‘Sports sponsorships offer a unique benefit over traditional advertising: consumers often form an emotional attachment to sports teams.’’

OUTCOME
According to Victor Kimble, the Conseco account supervisor at Fallon McElligott, the campaign succeeded in getting the Conseco message out in a nontraditional way. Kimble believed that it put Conseco ‘‘on the awareness map’’ and ‘‘gave them the buzz they needed’’ to get started. Conseco used Fallon McElligott for its next wave of national advertising, created for television and print and launched almost exactly one year after the 1998 campaign. Kimble said that the strategy was refined for the 1999 campaign, which featured commercials in which a bride and groom were forced to cater their own wedding and a man in a wet suit went snorkeling for coins in a fountain to fund his retirement. The latter spot won a Silver Lion at the Cannes Film Festival in the product category of ‘‘investment, insurance and property development.’’
Observers judged Conseco’s marketing efforts to the lower-income segment to be well-timed. According to James Bell, a senior partner with New York corporate brand specialist Lippencott & Margulies, there has been ‘‘a hiatus’’ in effective advertising to this market, with most marketing aimed toward ‘‘slicked-back guys with wire-rimmed glasses getting on airplanes in first class.’’ Stewart Stockdale, Conseco’s executive vice president of marketing and strategic planning, said in July 1999 that he was ‘‘very pleased’’ with the recognition Conseco advertising was getting. ‘‘We are even more pleased that our campaign to build a nationwide consumer brand focusing on financial services for middle America—households with $25,000 to $75,000 in annual income—is working. Awareness of Conseco has doubled in the past year. Even more importantly, we’ve seen healthy increases in overall preference for our brand, in consumer receptivity to purchase our products, and in the number of positive traits consumers associate with our brand. Brand-building is a long-term effort, but we’re off to a great start.’’

CHILD HUNGER CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW
ConAgra Foods, the $14 billion packaged-food giant, created its Feeding Children Better program in 1999 in response to the growing problem of childhood hunger in the United States. In conjunction with the Advertising Council and America’s Second Harvest, ConAgra’s Feeding Children Better program launched a multitiered public service campaign to increase awareness and understanding of childhood hunger, which, at the time, affected approximately 14 million American children. The ‘‘Child Hunger’’ public service campaign, which started in 2001, used television, print, radio, Web banners, and pamphlets, reaching 57.5 million people in its first year alone. Created by advertising agencies Bartle Bogle Hegarty of New York and Euro RSCG Tatham Partners of Chicago, both of whom volunteered their services free of charge, the ads conveyed to the public the realities of being poor and hungry. The first part of the campaign, conceived by Bartle Bogle Hegarty, used the tagline ‘‘The sooner you believe it, the sooner we can end it’’ and involved heartbreaking television spots drawn from real-life stories. In ‘‘Shared Food,’’ for example, a girl prepared a meager meal for the younger children in her family but neglected to feed herself. Euro RSCG, which took over the account in 2002 and changed the tagline to ‘‘Hunger. A choice no one should have to make,’’ created equally poignant TV commercials. ‘‘Rent or Food,’’ ‘‘Heat or Food,’’ and ‘‘Medicine or Food’’ were all created in an attempt to disclose the terrible choices many poor families had long had to make.
In the end the ‘‘Child Hunger’’ campaign was considered successful. More than $45 million of media was donated to promote the campaign, accomplishing ConAgra’s goal of gaining free media exposure for the problem and thus making the other tasks more easily attained. There were 285,250 hits on Feeding Children Better’s website (the URL was displayed in all advertising materials), there was an increased awareness that childhood hunger existed in America, and in response to the campaign the U.S. Department of Agriculture donated 9 million lunches to schools in the summer of 2001.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The Feeding Children Better program was established in 1999 by ConAgra Foods, a leading packaged-food company offering such brands as ACT II, Healthy Choice, Kid Choice, Peter Pan, and Parkay. Feeding Children Better—which became the largest corporate-backed program to fight child hunger—was divided into three major components: Kids Cafe, Rapid Food Distribution System, and Public Awareness Campaign. In a combined effort the three divisions were able to donate food, to assist in its distribution to the hungry, and to raise awareness both of the organization and of child hunger in the United States.
To help run Feeding Children Better, ConAgra partnered with the national nonprofit group America’s Second Harvest, the largest charitable domestic hungerrelief organization in the United States. America’s Second Harvest had evolved into a network of more than 200 food banks, which, in total, dispensed food and grocery products to approximately 50,000 charitable hungerrelief agencies. The organization administered Feeding Children Better’s Kids Cafes and Rapid Food Distribution System. To operate the Feeding Children Better program, ConAgra also teamed up with the Center on Hunger and Poverty, a research center based at Brandeis University that had long been dedicated to serving the needs of low-income Americans. Feeding Children Better’s ‘‘Child Hunger’’ campaign developed as a result of a hunger-awareness initiative conducted in 2001 by ConAgra Foods, the Advertising Council, and America’s Second Harvest. In ConAgra’s words (from the Feeding Children Better website), ‘‘By educating the public about child hunger, ConAgra Foods’ Feeding Children Better program seeks to be a catalyst and encourage others to get involved in the fight against child hunger. The ultimate goal is to insure that American children have the capacity to grow, to learn in school and to reach their full potential.’’

TARGET MARKET
At the campaign’s start 14 million American children had been classified by America’s Second Harvest as ‘‘food insecure,’’ meaning that they were hungry or at risk of hunger. In a country of great prosperity, this evergrowing problem went largely undetected. ‘‘Child Hunger’’ advertising directly targeted hungry children and their families, letting them know who to contact if they needed food assistance. ConAgra desired to bring attention to this group during the summer months, when the national free-lunch program would reach far fewer children than during the school year. Only about 2.2 million kids would be fed during the summer, compared with 14 million during the school year. For this reason the campaign was released during the summer. Those who could directly benefit from food distribution were not the only ones targeted by the ‘‘Child Hunger’’ campaign. Raising awareness in all Americans was the goal. Thus the campaign directed viewers to the Feeding Children Better website, where they could become better educated about hunger and, in particular, about child hunger. Providing such information as ‘‘Every fourth person standing in a soup kitchen line is a child,’’ ‘‘13 million kids live in households that do not have an adequate supply of food,’’ and ‘‘One in five children in the U.S. is hungry or at the risk of hunger every year,’’ ConAgra Foods and Feeding Children Better hoped to spread compassion for the poor and to find donors for the program.

‘‘STOP THE WASTE!’’
Results from a 2004 study revealed that nearly half of all the food in the United States went to waste. The University of Arizona study, led by anthropologist Timothy Jones, looked at food loss over a 10-year period and concluded that of all food ready for harvest, 40 to 50 percent never got eaten. Jones stated that if measures were made to diminish waste, each year tens of billions of dollars would be saved—money that, he suggested, could be used to fight hunger via contributions to such programs as America’s Second Harvest.

COMPETITION
There had been a great many other hunger-prevention programs developed in the United States. The Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) was one such program. A national organization, FRAC was founded in 1970 as a public interest law firm and grew to be a key player in the fight to decrease hunger in America. Like Feeding Children Better, FRAC focused on child hunger. In particular the organization engaged in ongoing research to document national hunger and its effect on low-income families with children.
Share Our Strength (SOS), with the motto ‘‘It takes more than food to fight hunger,’’ was another leading antihunger advocate. The program, founded in 1984 and based in Washington, D.C., had raised more than $180 million in the fight against hunger and poverty, both in the United States and worldwide. SOS’s approach centered on teaching cooking and nutrition classes to low-income families. It also managed a number of corporate-backed campaigns, such as ‘‘Charge against Hunger,’’ which operated from 1993 to 1996 and was sponsored by American Express. By donating three cents from every fourth-quarter transaction, the credit-card company raised $21 million for SOS.
Meanwhile ConAgra Foods (a top producer of food in the United States), which provided funding for Feeding Children Better and which in 2004 had sales exceeding $14 billion, faced steep competition in its sale of packaged foods. ConAgra’s main competitors were Kraft Foods (with 2004 sales exceeding $32 billion) and Nestle´ (with 2004 sales totaling more than $76 billion). Neither megacorporation had backed a major nonprofit in the specific way that ConAgra had with Feeding Children Better, although they had historically given to many charitable organizations, often in connection with nutrition. Kraft, for instance, created a ‘‘Kraft Cares’’ global philanthropy program, which focused on two main areas: hunger and healthy lifestyles. Still these efforts tended to be shorter term and promotion oriented, instead of long-term, nationwide commitments like the one ConAgra had made to Feeding Children Better. Further ConAgra was the only company to run a public service campaign specifically to fight childhood hunger in the United States.

MARKETING STRATEGY
The ‘‘Child Hunger’’ campaign aired in 2001 as a series of public service announcements, with advertisements created by volunteer ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty, based in New York City. The announcements’ main objective was to raise awareness about hunger, especially child hunger, in the United States and to increase empathy toward parents of hungry children. With the ‘‘Child Hunger’’ campaign ConAgra, the Ad Council, and America’s Second Harvest wanted to change the general perception of child hunger as being a result of a lazy parent not doing his or her job. The advertising was intended to reveal the difficult choices these parents had long had to make, such as deciding whether to spend money on rent or food. Further they aimed to expose the damaging physical and mental effects of hunger on children. Another objective was to provide opportunities for citizens to take action against childhood hunger. These would prove difficult tasks, because, in addition to the negative opinions the public had formed about hungry children and their parents, there was an inaccurate national perception that hunger barely existed in the United States.
Using the tagline ‘‘The sooner you believe it, the sooner we can end it,’’ the tragic television spots, directed by Joe Pytka of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, were drawn from real-life stories. In ‘‘Ketchup Soup’’ a mother scavenged ketchup packets from take-out restaurants in order to make ketchup-and-water soup for her young family. In ‘‘Chicken Pox’’ a young girl talked her brother into attending school when he had chicken pox just so he could receive his free lunch. Finally ‘‘Shared Food’’ portrayed a girl preparing a meager meal for her younger siblings. At the end of the spot the camera backed up to reveal that the older girl did not eat anything, leaving her portion for the others.
In 2002 Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s contract ended, and Euro RSCG Tatham Partners continued the campaign, which took on a different tagline, ‘‘Hunger. A choice no one should have to make.’’ The agenda, however, remained the same: to spread the word about childhood hunger in the United States, with a focus on the terrible choices poor families continually have had to face. Additional TV spots were released. In one, titled ‘‘Rent or Food,’’ a mother, with her children listening nearby, tried to explain to her landlord that she could not pay the rent because she needed the money to feed her children. Other spots, including ‘‘Heat or Food’’ and ‘‘Medicine or Food,’’ depicted the same message.
In addition to television, the campaign appeared in various forms, including radio, print ads, Web banners, and pamphlets. Among the print ads was one about ‘‘Julie,’’ who was cold and suffered from what the ad called ‘‘Chicken Skin.’’ Every ad directed the audience to a toll-free number, 1-800-FEED-KIDS, as well as to a website, http://www.feedingchildrenbetter.org. All were made possible through donated media that exceeded $45 million in value. The campaign continued through 2003.

OUTCOME
The efforts of Bartle Bogle Hegarty and Euro RSCG Tatham Partners were met with accolades from the advertising industry. Among the campaign’s many awards were an International Andy award and a silver EFFIE award, the latter of which judged campaigns on the basis of their results. More importantly the ad agencies and organizations behind the campaign considered it to have achieved its goals.
The campaign’s first objective—gaining free media exposure—was exceedingly met. While in 2001 the average Ad Council campaign received $28.6 million in donated media, ‘‘Child Hunger’’ received $45.3 million. Second, the ads also successfully inspired action: from June through December of 2001, the campaign’s 800 number received 2,677 calls, while its website received 285,250 hits. By the campaign’s end the number of website hits had reached 507,400. Ninety percent of telephone calls had been inspired by the television and radio spots. Third, awareness of childhood hunger in America increased dramatically. In a public-opinion study run by the Ad Council, 50 percent of participants in 2001 said that they believed childhood hunger existed in the United States. In 2002 the number jumped to 87 percent. When participants were asked if they thought that the problem existed in their own community, only 10 percent in 2001 said yes. In 2002 the number increased to 39 percent. The campaign also achieved its goal of generating a collective concern and discussion so that the problem would no longer be hidden. As a direct result of the campaign, in the summer of 2001 the U.S. Department of Agriculture donated to schools 9 million lunches for children in need. On a wider scale the advertising reached more than 57.5 million people, who either read, watched or heard about the issue through means of the ‘‘Child Hunger’’ campaign.

MOTHER BOYLE CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW
By 2005 the Portland, Oregon–based Columbia Sportswear Company was the largest seller of skiwear in the United States and an industry leader worldwide. Founded in 1938 by German immigrants Paul and Marie Lamfrom and their daughter Gert, the company grew into a billion-dollar-a-year enterprise by 2003. Much of Columbia’s growth was attributed to the 1984 launch of its signature ‘‘Mother Boyle’’ advertising campaign, which placed Gert Boyle, who became the company’s CEO in 1970, front and center as the company’s spokesperson. The grandmother with the fake ‘‘Born to Nag’’ tattoo proved an instant success as the personification of Columbia Sportswear’s no-nonsense durability. Beginning in 1984 the print ads and television spots created by Columbia’s advertising agency, Portlandbased Borders Perrin Norrander, cemented the company’s reputation for manufacturing coats, hats, and other cold-weather apparel that could stand up to the harshest weather conditions. The implication of the humorous advertising, especially the television spots in which Gert inflicted torture on her real-life son, Tim, the company’s president and CEO since 1995, was that Columbia’s products, particularly the heavy-duty parkas, were as tough as the ‘‘one tough mother’’ who ran the company. A typical television spot from 2000 featured Gert driving a Zamboni across an ice rink. When she passed over a drinking straw poking through the ice, viewers saw Tim embedded in the ice, using the straw to breathe. Presumably his Columbia parka made the frigid temperature bearable. As Columbia’s primary marketing campaign, ‘‘Mother Boyle’’ received the lion’s share of the company’s advertising budget over the years, which in 2004 alone amounted to $15 million.
The success of the campaign was evident through its longevity. For more than 20 years Gert Boyle played the company’s stone-faced matriarch, exposing her son to heinous conditions in the television spots and scolding readers in print ads. When the campaign began in 1984, Columbia Sportswear’s annual sales were $13 million; by 1997 that number had reached $358 million. Most importantly the campaign gave the company a recognizable public face. Gert Boyle proved irresistible to reporters, who flocked to profile her, thereby giving the company free publicity in magazines such as Time and Forbes, a writer from which dubbed her ‘‘a Leona Helmsley with humor.’’ In 2005 Boyle capitalized on her popularity by publishing her autobiography, One Tough Mother: Success in Life, Business, and Apple Pies.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Columbia’s marketing strategy relied heavily on Boyle’s rags-to-riches life story and her supersized personality. The tale of a homemaker with three children who was thrust into the business world after her husband suddenly died was as American as apple pie. Having the moxie to stand up to the bankers and lawyers who wanted her to sell the company for pennies and persevering long enough to turn it into a major brand made her a hero in the business world. ‘‘Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise’’ was her oft-stated motto. Columbia Sportswear hit its stride in the early 1980s when it introduced the Bugaboo ski jacket, a two-in-one system comprising a detachable liner and an outer shell, both of which could be worn separately. Apart from the product, the timing was right. People were beginning to spend more time outdoors and were also adopting a more casual approach to outerwear than in previous years. The fitness craze made outdoor sports, skiing in particular, more popular than ever before. The Bugaboo jacket became the company’s signature product, selling millions of units over the next two decades.
Gert Boyle assumed the helm of the company in 1970 following the unexpected death of her husband, Neal Boyle, who had taken over from Gert’s father several years earlier. Lawyers urged her to sell the struggling company, but she refused. For the paltry sum they were willing to pay her, she figured it made more sense for her to run the company into the ground herself.
Growth was slow. For several years Columbia Sportswear subsisted by selling its designs to other companies, such as Eddie Bauer and L.L. Bean. Then, as Tim Boyle explained to CNN/Money, the breakthrough came when he realized ‘‘that brands are really all you have to sell, and products are just extensions of the brand.’’ With that thought in mind Columbia Sportswear set out to redefine their image.
By 1983 executives from Columbia, along with representatives from Borders Perrin Norrander, decided the company needed to distinguish itself from the competition. ‘‘Back in 1983,’’ Gert told a writer for Inc. Magazine, ‘‘our advertising was about how our products weren’t just manufactured, they were engineered. The trouble was, everybody else in our industry was advertising the same way. So our advertising agency asked us, ‘What’s different about Columbia Sportswear?’ ’’ The answer was Gert Boyle. Not everyone, however, was convinced that the self-described ‘‘little old lady’’ could win the brand loyalty of hard-core sportsmen and athletes. They gave it a shot anyhow. The first ad read, ‘‘Before it passes Mother Nature, it has to pass Mother Boyle.’’ A campaign was born.

TARGET MARKET
The campaign targeted sports aficionados. Columbia’s print ads ran predominantly in sports-themed magazines, such as Outdoors, Hiking, Backpacker, and Sports Illustrated, and many of its television spots ran on niche cable channels, including ESPN, MTV, and Comedy Central. Though Columbia Sportswear products were readily available at high-end sports retailers, such as REI and Cabela’s, they were often also available at many department stores and even in the company’s own flagship stores in Portland, Oregon; London, England; and Paris, France. Indeed the ‘‘Mother Boyle’’ campaign proved to have international appeal. Gert Boyle told a reporter for CNN/Money that the campaign was well received in Australia. ‘‘They have the same sense of humor as we do. You know, they all have mothers.’’ Apart from targeting those interested in sports, the ‘‘Mother Boyle’’ campaign appealed to people who lived and worked in cold climates and relied on quality outerwear to get them through long, frigid winters. By emphasizing durability over style, the advertising zeroed in on those who valued a reasonably priced product that served its purpose season after season. With casual dress becoming the standard in almost every sector of the population, Columbia’s advertising capitalized on the middle-class consumer who was driven more by comfort and price than style.

ADVERTISING STRATEGY: BAWDY HUMOR
In 2002 Borders Perrin Norrander, Columbia Sportswear’s longtime advertising agency, launched a print ad for the company’s Jr. Fire Ridge Parka, a winter coat for children. The ad’s copy offered the first of two major guffaws: ‘‘You can freeze your sperm. You can freeze your embryos. But last we checked it was still illegal to freeze your children.’’ Mother Boyle piped in at the bottom: ‘‘Early signs of hypothermia include poor coordination and confusion. Two things best saved for puberty.’’

COMPETITION
In terms of sportswear, Columbia’s closest competitors were Timberland and North Face, although it also competed with the apparel divisions of Reebok and Nike. Timberland’s print and television advertising, including its catchphrase ‘‘Make It Better,’’ focused on the durability of the company’s products and featured the same rugged outdoor terrain that could be found in Columbia’s advertising. The message was similar to Columbia’s ‘‘Mother Boyle’’ ads, minus the humor and the indelible image of a no-holds-barred woman running the show.
North Face, a high-performance outerwear manufacturer, offered expensive items that attempted to keep pace with fashion trends, a strategy eschewed by Columbia. Part of Gert Boyle’s appeal was her dedication to practicality over style, as evidenced by the fact that the design of Columbia’s Bugaboo jacket never changed in more than 17 years of production. North Face, by comparison, focused its advertising around the stars of ‘‘extreme’’ sports, such as Alpine mountain climbing, and marketed its product as a ‘‘prestige’’ brand, as opposed to Columbia’s dedication to its practicality, durability, and functionality. This made North Face more vulnerable to the finicky marketplace, as the company found out in the 1990s when its sales plummeted.
‘‘Everybody else’s ads in the outdoor-clothing business are the same,’’ Gert Boyle told Inc. Magazine. ‘‘There’s always a young, firm body. Sometimes, with a little luck, there are two firm bodies intertwined with each other . . . But if you put your finger over the name of the people who are advertising, you couldn’t tell whose ad it is. Well, ours are different.’’

MARKETING STRATEGY
Gert Boyle credited the originality of the ‘‘Mother Boyle’’ campaign for Columbia’s success. ‘‘You can look at nine-tenths of the manufacturers of outerwear, skiwear, anything like that—they’re all the same ads. All these gorgeous people who couldn’t possibly do on skis what they’re supposed to be doing. Then you’ve got the little old lady. That’s what sets us apart. Not because we make better clothing, but because the advertising gets your attention,’’ she told David Whitford of Fortune Small Business.
As Paul Swangard of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center told Bryan Brumley of the Associated Press, corporate success ‘‘starts with leadership. And it starts with the company defining its brand through its ownership. Gert has been synonymous with the identity that one equates with Columbia.’’ As the public face of Columbia, Boyle was an anomaly. ‘‘If you see any ad of an outdoor company, you see beautiful young people. What makes Columbia different—there is this little old lady,’’ she told a reporter for the Financial Times. Yet her high profile was more than just vanity. Jack Peterson, of Borders Perrin Norrander, told a writer for Adweek that she also ‘‘embodies everything the brand is about—uncompromising quality, toughness.’’
In addition to toughness, the ‘‘Mother Boyle’’ ads occasionally employed ribald language that was unusual for the normally staid field of outerwear. ‘‘There’s nothing motherly about mother nature,’’ read the headline of a 2002 ad for Columbia’s Boundary Peak Parka. ‘‘Except maybe her big mountainous breasts.’’ Below that, Gert Boyle piped up, ‘‘I’ve got hot flashes to keep me warm. You’ll need something that zips.’’ For an industry typically consumed with testosterone-influenced machismo, this female-centric viewpoint was bold and funny. Peterson told Adweek that despite the controversial nature of the ads’ text, research revealed 97 percent approval ratings for the campaign. The controversy also helped differentiate Columbia from marketing behemoths such as Nike. ‘‘It’s always been a Columbia trademark to be a sharper nail rather than a heavier hammer,’’ Peterson said.
The company’s television spots for 2005 featured two new ‘‘Mother Boyle’’ ads. In one Gert Boyle operated a cement mixer, which excreted an assortment of odd objects down its trough. The last object was Tim Boyle, wearing a pristine Columbia parka. In the ‘‘Dart’’ spot Tim addressed a group of business associates in a conference room during a meeting. Mother Boyle took aim from the hallway and blew a dart into his neck. The next shot revealed Tim abandoned in a vast snowy wilderness as his mother departed in a helicopter.
Beyond Gert Boyle’s charisma, the ‘‘Mother Boyle’’ television spots worked because of the dynamic between her and her son. Not many corporate CEOs would agree to be the punch line of a joke, but Tim Boyle was philosophical about it. ‘‘It’s very effective, so I guess I have to suck it up,’’ he told a reporter for CNN/Money.

ONE TOUGH MOTHER: THE BOOK
In 2005 Gert Boyle published her autobiography, One Tough Mother: Success in Life, Business, and Apple Pies. The book’s cover showed Boyle brandishing the ‘‘Born to Nag’’ tattoo featured in early ads for Columbia’s ‘‘Mother Boyle’’ campaign.

OUTCOME
Over the years the ‘‘Mother Boyle’’ campaign not only increased Columbia Sportswear’s sales but it also earned respect in the advertising business. Three of the ads were shortlisted for Clio Awards: 1998’s print ad ‘‘Three Reasons to Own a Good Pair of Boots,’’ 1998’s ‘‘When You Are as Old as the Hills,’’ and 2001’s television spot ‘‘Sled Dogs.’’
Anchored by the ‘‘Mother Boyle’’ campaign, the company showed earnings in 2000 that had increased 70 percent over the previous year, with revenues surpassing $600 million. By 2005 sales had reached $1 billion.
As Gert Boyle entered her 80s (in 2004), she left the company’s daily business to her son but continued to star in television spots and retained her position as chairman of the board, with no plans to retire. As she wrote in Fortune Small Business, ‘‘They asked Tim once, ‘What’s going to happen to the ad when your mother dies?’ He said, ‘We’ll have her stuffed.’’’

YOU ARE WHAT YOU DRINK CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW
The marketing of diet products has been fraught with unique challenges because of their focus on physical appearance. Issues such as cultural ideals of beauty, physical health, gender roles, sexuality, and personal identity all hover implicitly or explicitly around the diet products phenomenon. Such concerns constituted only one minefield for the Coca-Cola Company in its advertising of Diet Coke. Another was the word ‘‘diet’’ itself, associated with self-denial. By the mid-1990s few foods or drinks other than diet sodas still carried the label. New products that had no negative ‘‘diet’’ connotations, such as iced teas and flavored waters, began to take market share. Yet Diet Coke’s brand equity was entrenched and powerful. Diet Coke, along with regular Coke, was a flagship product for Coca-Cola. Thus, Coca-Cola needed to maintain and strengthen a positive association based on Diet Coke’s already significant market share, as well as to maintain and increase that share.
In 1995 Coca-Cola dropped Diet Coke’s longtime tag line ‘‘Just for the taste of it’’ and shifted focus from taste to the less direct, lifestyle-oriented benefits of drinking Diet Coke. The company tapped its agency, Lowe & Partners/SMS of New York, for an ad campaign estimated to cost $40 million and that comprised three television spots demonstrating the positive effects of drinking Diet Coke. Using the tag line ‘‘You are what you drink,’’ the campaign opened in May 1997 and aired across the United States as well as in the United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa, and Australia. But the campaign’s message and humor were misunderstood, negative feedback was received, and Lowe and Coca-Cola quickly retrenched with new spots. These problems occurred, in large part, because of the difficulty of navigating through the treacherous sea of issues attached to the marketing of products tagged ‘‘diet.’’

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Diet colas had been on the market over 10 years when Coca-Cola introduced Diet Coke in 1982. In the 1960s and 1970s the R. C. Cola Company pioneered the diet cola product category. PepsiCo introduced Diet Pepsi in the 1970s as well. Diet Coke’s launch was one of the most successful ever; it rapidly took the lead in market share for diet colas. Better taste was part of that success, as Diet Coke was the first diet cola to use the artificial sweetener NutraSweet. Hence, its first tag line ‘‘Just for the taste of it’’ promoted this benefit. The tag line was to be used on and off for a decade. By April 1988 Diet Coke held 10.1 percent of the $40 billion soft drink market based on supermarket sales, while Diet Pepsi held 6.9 percent.
The diet soft drink category hit its stride in the 1980s, expanding to 30 percent of the soft drink market. During that decade, diet colas drove the growth of the soft drink market, with consumption growing four to five times faster than for sugared sodas. This coincided with changes occurring among the baby boomers: they were aging, and they began exercising with a vengeance and watching calories. But they did not want to give up flavor. ‘‘Having it all,’’ it seemed, included undiminishing beauty and fitness as well as enjoyment of food and drink. The tag ‘‘Just for the taste of it’’ fit this mind-set. The implication that the products’ taste was good enough to be appreciated for its own sake neutralized the negative association of the word ‘‘diet.’’
The swift growth of the diet drink category stopped abruptly in the 1990s. Sales stayed relatively flat, while the growth of sugared sodas went up. In 1990 diet colas accounted for 21.3 percent of cola sales; this fell to 18.7 percent by 1996. According to USA Today, ‘‘both Coca-Cola and Pepsi saw their diet cola shares dip in retail stores two-tenths of a percentage point during the first half of 1997.’’
Several analysts identified key factors in the sluggish 1990s diet drink sales. John Sicher of Beverage Digest, speaking to USA Today, mentioned ‘‘the strong performances by bottled waters and the fact that many dieters now focus more on fat than calories.’’ In the same article, Michael Bellas of Beverage Marketing noted that ‘‘healthconscious consumers also have some misgivings about artificial sweeteners and caffeine.’’ Manny Goldman, a Paine Webber analyst speaking on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition in May 1997, commented that in the 1990s ‘‘people were becoming a little more selfindulgent, and they were concerned with satisfying their own basal desires, like things that taste good. They were willing to take on some calories to do that.’’ The baby boomers were actually mellowing out. The fight against the effects of time and gravity was ultimately unwinnable, so they chose to adapt. In the meantime, a new market, Generation X, was emerging, and their very different mind-set had to be addressed if Diet Coke was to maintain or improve market share.
As these forces played out, Senior Vice President of Marketing Sergio Zyman guided the company’s marketing style. Often described as brilliant, mercurial, and temperamental, he was dubbed by Cynthia Mitchell of The Atlanta Journal and Constitution ‘‘one of the architects of contemporary advertising.’’ Zyman became known as the person who launched Diet Coke, a huge and immediate success. This was followed in 1993 by the launch of New Coke, a huge and immediate failure. Acting as fall guy, Zyman left the company. Zyman’s approach to the marketing process was innovative and iconoclastic. For example, he increased Coke’s agency network to over two dozen shops. Moreover, he rapidly changed the marketing of Diet Coke, a strategy complicated by the fact that the market for diet soft drinks was itself rapidly changing. ‘‘It is unpredictability that has confused diet Coke’s message to consumers,’’ concluded Benzera and Parpis of BrandWeek.
A summary of the major advertising campaigns of the 1990s illustrates this unpredictability and the resulting fragmentation of brand image. In January 1990 a series of 30-second Diet Coke ads featured celebrities saying goodbye to sugared Pepsi Cola in favor of Diet Coke. The campaign’s theme was ‘‘The move is on.’’
This was a clear effort to grab soft drink market share:
Diet Coke was third overall with 8.9 percent, and Pepsi Cola was second with 18.3 percent. In January 1993 Diet Coke dropped the tag line ‘‘Just for the taste of it’’ and presented two new slogans: ‘‘One awesome calorie’’ and ‘‘Taste it all,’’ splitting the message into two different directions. A famous—or infamous—1994 spot created by Lowe & Partners reversed stereotypical gender roles by having office women ogle a shirtless construction worker drinking a Diet Coke on his break.
In 1995 Zyman returned to Coca-Cola and resumed his marketing of Diet Coke. He was ‘‘charged with shaking up the company’s marketing efforts,’’ noted Mitchell. It is questionable whether the company needed shaking up as much as it needed focus. One relatively conceptual 1995 spot that received critical approval featured a swimming elephant; it was created by the Minneapolis agency Fallon McElligot. Although visually engaging, the spot failed to mesh thematically with other Diet Coke commercials. Another spot produced the same year took a decidedly nonesoteric approach, featuring supermodel Stephanie Seymour dismissing a male admirer at a lunch counter. Diet Coke did grow in 1995 by 3.6 percent, compared with less than 2 percent for other diet soft drinks, but the growth was less than that of Coca-Cola’s other soft drinks. And given that the 1995 Diet Coke sales were flat in grocery stores, convenience stores, and gas stations, the miscellany of commercials was not working. Diet Coke’s share of the soft drink market dropped three-tenths of a percent from 1991 to 1995.
In 1996 Coke spent $72 million on commercials for Diet Coke. A 1996 campaign from Lowe featured variations on the ‘‘Just for the taste of it’’ jingle, such as ‘‘Just for the fun of it.’’ Diet Coke sponsored the Grammy Awards in 1996 and based an early 1997 promotion, ‘‘Diet Coke Untapped,’’ on that sponsorship. Then in January 1997 Diet Coke started an $18 million-plus campaign featuring music stars and prizes. The varied nature of the market required several types of ads. Yet the campaign needed an overarching plan allowing its impact to build over time. This would have required a disciplined strategic partnership between Coca-Cola and the primary agency, Lowe, with consistent direction provided by Coca-Cola as a foundation for the agency’s sustained creative activity.

TARGET MARKET
Part of the difficulty of marketing Diet Coke resided in the diversity of its market, each segment of which had it own hot spots and red flags. Because by 1997 the taste issue was no longer news, Coca-Cola needed to focus on the concerns of Diet Coke drinkers and potential drinkers. The company teamed with Lowe early that year to create three new television spots with the tag line ‘‘You are what you drink.’’ The spots were based on the premise that the product helped people to look and feel their best.
Specifically, the effort was targeted at what Coca-Cola identified as three ‘‘attitudinal groups,’’ distilled from the diverse Diet Coke market. The ‘‘fit and confidents’’ were the younger and hipper group, 20-something men and women who did not need to diet but feared gaining weight. The ‘‘reluctant dieters’’ were men and women in their 30s who wanted to look good without sacrificing taste. The ‘‘aggressive dieters’’ were women 35 and over who worked hard to stay fit. Coca-Cola intended this effort not only to spur greater usage of Diet Coke among current Diet Coke drinkers but also to bring back some lapsed users and pull in some drinkers of regular Coke as well.

COMPETITION
Although many diet sodas have tried to corner the market over the years, Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi have been locked in a head-to-head battle from the start, with Diet Coke gaining and holding the greater market share but Diet Pepsi always too close for comfort, particularly in terms of brand recognition and popularity among retail consumers. Together, Coca-Cola and Pepsi brands controlled 75 percent of the soft drink business by 1997, with their diet colas alone earning more than $10 billion in sales.
An incident occurring in the 1980s exemplifies the intensity of the Diet Coke-Diet Pepsi competition. Diet Coke at that point held 10.1 percent of the soft drink market and Diet Pepsi 6.9 percent. Pepsi produced a TV ad in which boxer Mike Tyson told reporters that Diet Pepsi ‘‘beat the taste of Diet Coke’’ in consumer taste tests. Tyson had just beaten Leon Spinks in a major match, which Pepsi had exclusively sponsored. Coke challenged the methodology behind the claim, demanded that Pepsi produce its research, and asked the networks to withdraw the ads (which they did not). Pepsi submitted documentation to the networks and challenged Coke’s own testing methods. Another component of the $4.4 million campaign was a full-page ad in the New York Times showing Tyson holding a can of Diet Pepsi. The ad copy read, ‘‘After a couple of pops in the mouth, it was over. Diet Pepsi had won the title. In head-to-head taste tests, Diet Pepsi decisively beat the taste of Diet Coke.’’
The market share percentages of the two competitors shifted in the mid-1990s even more in Diet Coke’s favor. In 1995 Diet Coke was third among all soft drinks in market share, with 8.8 percent, the same as the previous year. Diet Pepsi was fifth, the same place as in 1994, but lost 0.1 percent. By the last quarter of 1996 Diet Pepsi had fallen to seventh place, in spite of a 1.6 percent gain in sales volume. In its previous number four spot was Coca-Cola’s soda Sprite. Just $243,000 was spent on advertising Diet Pepsi in 1996, but in early 1997 PepsiCo completely repositioned its strategy with a new $19 million campaign.

MARKETING STRATEGY
In the first half of 1997, Diet Coke kept its number three position in the soft drink lineup, diet sodas overall continued to lose market share, and Diet Pepsi launched its new campaign featuring the slogan ‘‘This is diet?’’ During that time Coca-Cola had performed extensive research and positioning studies that led to the articulation of a new strategy: ‘‘Diet Coke helps you look and feel your best.’’ This was based in large part on the fact that, after all was said and done, there was nothing new, such as a better sweetener, on which to construct a more exciting message. Promoting taste alone was no longer an option. Moreover, Diet Pepsi had just launched its tasteoriented ‘‘This is diet?’’ ads. Lowe & Partners/SMS worked with Coca-Cola to produce three TV ads for the campaign, ‘‘Aunt Rosalina,’’ ‘‘Blizzard,’’ and ‘‘Queen.’’ The campaign followed swiftly on the heels of an image revamp for the brand, executed by SBG Partners, San Francisco, which consisted of a silvery new package and new graphics for the drink. It was designed to align the brand with various consumer lifestyles and represented the first genuine strategy for the brand since 1994. Coke executives believed that ‘‘the repositioning would re-energize the static diet category,’’ according to MediaWeek. The campaign broke on May 19, timed for the start of the summer season, and ran on network and cable.
The ‘‘Blizzard’’ spot showed two men commenting on women walking by who were bundled up against the cold. The women who drank Diet Cokes through their scarves were the ones the men favored. The ‘‘Queen’’ commercial showed a mirror telling a queen that she no longer was fair; rather, a girl drinking Diet Coke was. ‘‘Aunt Rosalina,’’ the most controversial spot in the series, was set in an Italian village. After watching a parade of beautiful, fit women who stroll by proudly holding cans of Diet Coke, a lovely little girl asks her old aunt, ‘‘If I drink Diet Coke, will I be beautiful too?’’ Aunt Rosalina replies, ‘‘I never had a Diet Coke, and look at me.’’ The camera moves to reveal her to be an ugly hag. The ad was rotated with ‘‘Blizzard’’ and ‘‘Queen’’ and received far less weight—166 spots out of 844. Approximately 60 percent of the commercials were shown during primetime, 20 percent during the day, and 10 percent during late night.
The tag line for these commercials, ‘‘You are what you drink,’’ was meant to be tongue-in-cheek and lighthearted while conveying the message that drinking Diet Coke could help the consumer look and feel good. In ‘‘Aunt Rosalina’’ this message was reinforced by the attractive women who were drinking Diet Coke. Intentionally they were caricatures rather than characters; the viewer was not expected to think she magically would look that way by drinking Diet Coke. In that sense the ad spoofed in a subtle way the goal of ideal physical beauty. Sergio Zyman, quoted in USA Today, explained that ‘‘this latest wave of advertising is less about well-recognized intrinsic attributes of the brand, such as taste and one-calorie refreshment. It is more about how someone feels and the self-confidence they project when they hold a Diet Coke.’’ Zyman told The Wall Street Journal Europe that for Coke to continue to rely on the theme of ‘‘taste and one-calorie is kind of beating a dead horse’’ and that the aim now was to ‘‘broaden the definition of Diet Coke. I would like to see people walking around with Diet Coke.’’ Or, as AdWeek ’s Debrah Goldman put it, the real message of the campaign was ‘‘to establish Diet Coke as a fashion accessory, . . . la Evian.’’

DIET COKE TAG LINES
‘‘Just for the taste of it’’: 1982–1992, 1995–1997.
‘‘One awesome calorie’’: 1993.
‘‘Taste it all’’: 1992.
‘‘This is refreshment’’: 1994.
‘‘You are what you drink’’: 1997.

OUTCOME
Consumer and critical reaction to the commercials was fast and harsh, and the airing of ‘‘Aunt Rosalina’’ ended on July 20, 1997, three months after it began. Coca-Cola received letters from customers criticizing its ‘‘sexist’’ approach. A nationwide poll reported in USA Today of 271 adults who had seen the Diet Coke commercials showed that 10 percent of all respondents liked the ads a lot, but this fell to only 3 percent for 18-to-24 year olds. Fully 21 percent of respondents disliked the spots. But a significant percentage, 16 percent, said the commercials were very effective, and almost two-thirds considered them somewhat effective, indicating conflict over the message. Responses of critics revealed that the intended playfulness of the commercials missed the mark. The milder commentary critiqued the spots for presumptuousness and lack of subtlety. Goldman of AdWeek wrote, ‘‘These spots are a classic case of a campaign with its briefs showing. Sure, Coca-Cola wants you to be what you drink, just as other advertisers hope you are what you wear or drive . . . .But an advertisement’s job is to elicit that reaction, not to assume it, or, worse, to pretend that it already exists.’’
On National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Joshua Levs questioned Coca-Cola’s Bob Bertini, who presented the rationale behind the commercials. Then Levs zeroed in: ‘‘ ‘You are what you drink’—who wants to be carbonated water, caramel color, aspartame, and potassium benzoate?’’ That he could even consider such a literal reading of the line—the very week the spot first aired—signaled serious problems with the commercial for Coke. Bob Garfield of Advertising Age opened his review of ‘‘Aunt Rosalina’’ with ‘‘This just in: Men are pigs.’’ He interpreted the commercial as affirming that the value of women lies in their slenderness and attractiveness to men. He did not see or accept that the spot’s humor actually poked fun at this attitude. The ‘‘troubling new spots,’’ he wrote, ‘‘remind women how important Diet Coke is in their relentless pursuit of svelteness, men’s attraction and self-esteem . . . . In the end, for all their tongue-in-cheek exaggeration, these spots don’t lampoon the cult of beauty. They validate it.’’
The ‘‘feel your best’’ component of the message seemed to have evaporated. The media budget was reduced as a result of this negative response, and creative development was undertaken to rectify the situation. Lowe produced two commercials, ‘‘Big Wrestlers,’’ which featured Sumo wrestlers who sincerely compliment each other’s appearance despite their tremendous size, and ‘‘It’s Him,’’ centered on an invisible man who is admired by attractive women in a bar, presumably because of his confidence and demeanor. These new spots, however, were attempts to breathe life into positions consumers had already rejected; ‘‘look and feel your best’’ had died. They received little weight in the last quarter of 1997 and were shelved in early 1998.
Shortly after ‘‘Aunt Rosalina’’ flopped, Wieden & Kennedy of Portland, Oregon, was assigned six 30-second Diet Coke commercials in a last-ditch attempt to get some traction. This spurred media speculation that Wieden would become the new agency for the brand. The spots were not well received. After that Coca-Cola recognized the need to step back and undertake ‘‘extensive research . . . to determine a strategy and long-term direction for the brand.’’ Two earlier spots produced by Lowe were aired then and continued to be aired through the summer of 1998.
In March 1998 Sergio Zyman resigned from Coca-Cola. The man who replaced Zyman, Charles S. Frenette, was Zyman’s opposite in terms of personality and operations background. Frenette continued to work with Lowe & Partners. He indicated that he planned to take a longer-term strategic approach to the Coke-Lowe partnership, so critical for the marketing of Diet Coke during times of cultural and demographic upheaval.

REAL CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW
Despite being the top soft-drink company in the world, the Coca-Cola Company showed signs of struggle in the 1990s, when consumers worldwide started demonstrating a strong preference for healthier beverages. Coca-Cola’s subsequent marketing efforts, including the 2003 ‘‘Real’’ campaign, reflected this change.
The multimillion-dollar ‘‘Real’’ campaign, which used a combination of music and celebrity presence to promote Coke Classic, was reminiscent of Coca-Cola ads from the 1960s to the ‘90s. The ‘‘Real’’ campaign’s message itself, that Coke is the ‘‘Real’’ thing, was a reminder of the company’s long heritage. The campaign’s numerous television and radio spots, as well as print ads, were targeted toward a teen and young-adult market, just as Coke advertising had long been. It was with these consumers in mind that the company signed on such actors as Penelope Cruz and Courtney Cox Arquette, as well as musicians Common and Mya, to promote the product.
The campaign was attention grabbing, catching the eyes and ears of its target audience. Most consumers who were polled claimed to like the ads ‘‘a lot.’’ The press seemed equally entertained by the campaign, raving about its advertising success, especially compared with the past three botched advertising attempts that Coke had recently endured. In fact, many ad critics thought the ‘‘Real’’ campaign marked the first Coke advertising success in a decade. The success, however, was not a financial one. Despite the campaign’s popularity, sales of Coke products, especially Coke Classic, continued to dwindle. Coke Classic in 2003 experienced a disheartening 3 percent decrease in sales. ‘‘Real’’ ran until 2005, when it was replaced by ‘‘Make It Real,’’ an extension of the previous campaign.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
In May 1886 Jacobs’ Pharmacy in Atlanta sold the first serving of Coca-Cola. Invented by John Pemberton (a Civil War veteran and pharmacist), the soft drink contained syrup, sugar, and carbonation, along with the caffeine-rich kola nut and the drug cocaine. The name Coca-Cola was invented by Pemberton’s bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, who also wrote the distinct script that has been sprawled on all Coca-Cola products to date. The beverage was not an instant success. In its first year at Jacobs’ Pharmacy, approximately nine servings were sold each day. Pemberton ended up with a $20 loss overall. But success, though not immediate, was right around the corner.
By the late 1890s Coca-Cola had become one of America’s most popular fountain drinks. And soon thereafter it was being sold all across the United States and Canada. Advertising played a key role in Coca-Cola’s early success, and for some time to come advertising would continue to contribute to its success. Its 1930s Santa advertising helped to create the modern image of Saint Nick, as well as an increased personal connection between consumers and Coke. In 1971 (while war persisted in Vietnam) a similar result was found with a television commercial showing young people gathered on a hilltop in Italy, singing, ‘‘I’d like to buy the world a Coke.’’ More than two decades later the ‘‘Always Coca-Cola’’ campaign, which introduced the very popular Coke-drinking polar bears, also ended with positive results. But advertising success would not come so easily in the future.
‘‘Always Coca-Cola’’ continued through 2000, when it was replaced by ‘‘Coca-Cola. Enjoy.’’ Neither campaign met with success. In 2001 Coca-Cola launched ‘‘Life Tastes Good,’’ but the campaign was pulled in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Largely because of consumers’ increasing preference for healthier beverages, sales of Coca-Cola were steadily declining. But perhaps consumers simply missed the polar bears and the entertaining campaign that featured them. With the thought that consumers might be won over by another successful advertising campaign, Coca-Cola threw millions into its 2003 ‘‘Real’’ advertising campaign.

TARGET MARKET
Since the 1990s Coke Classic had experienced a decrease in market share and volume in the beverage industry, especially among its younger consumers. Largely as a result of a nationwide focus on obesity and other health issues, which resulted in healthier eating habits (especially among the young), tastes for beverages changed. According to Beverage Digest, during each year between 1996 and 2000, Coke Classic’s sales either fell flat or reflected a decline. In 2000 there was a 0.1 percent increase. Younger people simply drank less cola than had earlier generations, preferring instead such beverages as bottled water, juices, and flavored sodas.
Coke’s 2003 ‘‘Real’’ campaign targeted the younger generation the company felt it was losing. While many longtime consumers had remained loyal to Coke, most of these represented an aging population. Young adults, in contrast, had the potential to be targeted for years to come. Because of this Coke’s ‘‘Real’’ campaign had a celebrity-heavy focus. Such big names as Cruz and Cox Arquette starred in new Coke commercials. The campaign premiered its first advertisement (the television commercial ‘‘Real Compared to What’’) during the 2003 American Music Awards, an event that typically drew a young audience.

COMPETITION
The Coca-Cola Company’s three main competitors were PepsiCo, Cadbury Schweppes, and Nestle´. Presenting the most challenging competition for Coca-Cola was PepsiCo, which had also long ago branched out beyond cola. Coke had extended its reach far into the ‘‘other beverages’’ market with Fanta, Sprite, Barq’s, Minute Maid, and Dasani water, among others, to a tune of some 400 drink brands in all, including coffees, juices, sports drinks, waters, and teas. PepsiCo had similarly expanded its ‘‘other beverages’’ market, having acquired, for example, Tropicana orange juice and Aquafina water (the top seller of bottled water in the United States). But PepsiCo also had gone beyond beverages by adding a number of nonbeverage food products, including Frito-Lay (the world’s number one distributor of corn chips and potato chips) and Rold Gold Pretzels. Although Cadbury Schweppes and Nestle´ might have seemed the less-obvious competitors of Coke products, they each succeeded in taking market share from the world’s leading soft-drink company. Largely associated with its chocolates, British-owned Cadbury, after merging with Schweppes in 1969, became a top competitor in the beverage business. With a long list of beverages offered (including 7 UP, A&W Root Beer, Canada Although Coca-Cola was the world’s leading softdrink distributor (with a 44 percent market share in 2003, a clear lead over second-place PepsiCo, at 31.8 percent), some of its competitors brought in significantly larger overall sales. In 2004, for instance, Nestle´’s total sales exceeded $76 billion and PepsiCo’s was in the neighborhood of $29 billion, while Coca-Cola’s was less than $22 billion. (Cadbury Schweppes trailed the pack at approximately $13 billion.)

MARKETING STRATEGY
Coca-Cola wanted to remind consumers of its past, its authenticity, its ‘‘realness’’ in its 2003 ‘‘Real’’ campaign. Created by ad agency Berlin Cameron/Red Cell in New York, the new slogan played off Coca-Cola slogans of the past: ‘‘It’s the real thing’’ and ‘‘Can’t beat the real thing.’’ (Initially the job of coming up with a new campaign was assigned to both Berlin and McCann-Erikson Worldwide Advertising in New York. With its ‘‘Real’’ idea Berlin took over the new campaign.)
Coca-Cola believed the ‘‘Real’’ campaign could return the company to a level of success that at least equaled what it had experienced during its ‘‘Always Coca-Cola’’ campaign years of 1996–98. (During that period the Coca-Cola Company had enjoyed an average 5 percent increase in volume change per year.) To achieve this goal Coke and Berlin relied heavily on a musical and celebrity presence. The campaign debuted with a 90-second ‘‘Real Compared to What’’ television commercial during the 2003 American Music Awards. In the commercial R&B singer Mya and hip-hop artist Common performed a remake of the 1960s jazz hit ‘‘Compared to What.’’ The commercial’s debut followed the duo’s presentation of the Coca-Cola New Music Award to the top unsigned artist or band.
In another television commercial, ‘‘Penelope,’’ Cruz walked into a restaurant, guzzled a Coke Classic, burped, and giggled. ‘‘The Arquettes’’ was filmed on a set that copied the real home of Cox Arquette and husband David Arquette. A motive of the commercials was to reveal celebrities during ‘‘real’’ moments in which they enjoyed a ‘‘real’’ soft drink. In all more than a dozen television spots were filmed for the campaign. They featured a variety of celebrities, including late-night talk-show host Craig Kilborn, cyclist Lance Armstrong, and members of Coke’s NASCAR racing team. The campaign also included a major tie-in with the 2003 NCAA basketball tournament and a summer promotion that awarded families trips to theme parks. And in addition to its television presence, ‘‘Real’’ advertising was found in print, online, and on the radio waves. As to the latter Coke went all out, introducing ‘‘Coke FM,’’ in which 60-second spots featured well-known musicians. In all mediums the advertising efforts represented an attempt by Coca-Cola to return to the values of past campaigns. Coke wished to reveal its ‘‘real’’ values. As one consulting firm adviser pointed out, the ‘‘Real’’ campaign was something that easily could have been done in any decade since the 1960s. The question was, would consumers go for it?

NINETEENTH-CENTURY BIG-BUDGET ADVERTISING
In 1892, six years after Coca-Cola was first sold (for five cents a glass, in Atlanta’s Jacobs’ Pharmacy), the company had an advertising budget of $11,401 (accounting for inflation this would represent $234,006.49 in 2005). A budget of this size was highly unusual for the time. The advertising agenda included hiring salesmen to travel across the country to sell Coca-Cola to various businesses. To convince business owners to order the soda, the company often offered free merchandise (for instance, prescription scales and decorative clocks) that displayed the Coca-Cola logo. Another strategy involved the distribution of coupons, which allowed proprietors to try Coca-Cola for free.
Lastly Coca-Cola began placing its name everywhere:
on newspapers, outdoor posters, wall and barn signs, streetcar cards, and many other places. The combination of these efforts proved quite successful, and before long Coca-Cola had become a household name.
Dry, Dr Pepper, and Hawaiian Punch), Cadbury Schweppes managed to place itself third among the world’s top soft-drink providers. Nestle´, the top-selling food company in the world, became the world leader in coffee sales and one of the world’s largest makers of bottled water.

OUTCOME
Consumers were positive in their ratings of the ‘‘Real’’ advertisements. For instance, shortly after the campaign debuted a Harris study revealed that 25 percent of respondents claimed to ‘‘like the ads a lot,’’ while only 8 percent claimed to ‘‘dislike the ads.’’ Of those who liked the ads ‘‘a lot,’’ the largest presence was among 25- to 29-year-olds, followed by 18- to 24-year-olds. Thus Coke’s target market had indeed been reached. Financially, though, the campaign did not measure so successfully. Coca-Cola finished 2003 with a small decline in volume, down 0.2 percent from 2002. The results for Coke Classic were far less desirable: a 3 percent decrease from 2002.
Regardless of the popularity of the ‘‘Real’’ campaign, which generated a multitude of positive press, there was not much hope to promote Coke Classic in a marketplace that was squeezing out sugary colas. Contrary to the campaign’s message, consumers, who had been seeking healthier, lighter drinks, might actually have preferred the ‘‘unreal’’ thing. This could later be demonstrated by the notable success of Diet Coke with Lime (2004) and the introduction of other varieties of Diet Coke by 2005, including calorie-free Coca-Cola Zero (designed to taste more like Coke Classic than like Diet Coke).
Even as the ‘‘Real’’ campaign did not send consumers in droves to purchase Coke Classic, Coca-Cola hoped the campaign’s popularity would have lasting effects, prompting consumers to purchase the Coca-Cola brand product that better suited their tastes. To launch the new, healthier version of the classic, the 2005 Coca-Cola Zero campaign (‘‘Everybody Chill’’) took an approach similar to that of the ‘‘Real’’ campaign by reviving the 1971 ‘‘I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke’’ television spot. Thus ‘‘Everybody Chill’’ repeated the trend of looking to the past in the quest to find future customers.

OBEY YOUR THIRST CAMPAIGN (2004)

OVERVIEW
In late 2003 the Coca-Cola Company’s lemon-lime softdrink brand, Sprite, reigned as America’s fifth-best-selling soft drink and the highest-grossing lemon-lime soda in America. Even though Sprite appeared to be the clear leader over all lemon-lime soft drink brands, its market share was rapidly slipping to Sierra Mist, a lemon-lime soft drink sold by the Pepsi-Cola Company. Reusing its long-running tagline that was conceived by the ad agency Lowe & Partners in 1994, Sprite released a new variation of the ‘‘Obey Your Thirst’’ campaign to keep its product relevant to its 16- to 24-year-old target demographic. The WPP Group’s advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather released three television spots in February 2004 that introduced Sprite’s new mascot, Miles Thirst, a 10-inch-tall puppet. Hoping to attract the youth of the hip-hop and basketball cultures, Miles Thirst’s wardrobe consisted of flashy hip-hop garb. The wisecracking puppet proclaimed his love for Sprite in two television spots. In a third commercial, titled ‘‘LeBron,’’ LeBron James, the National Basketball Association (NBA) all-star, gave Miles Thirst a tour of his decadent home. The puppet appeared unimpressed until James led him into his kitchen, which was equipped with a Sprite vending machine. The campaign’s 2004 budget was estimated at $45 million. Besides the television spots, media included online advertisement, a Miles Thirst website, and the passing out of free posters, magnets, stickers, and T-shirts featuring Miles Thirst. The campaign and tagline ended in 2005 after Sprite dropped Ogilvy & Mather for the Miami-based advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky.
Overall success for the 2004 campaign was mild. Besides collecting a Bronze One Show Award in the category of Promotional and Point of Purchase Posters in 2004, the campaign was also appreciated by a majority of its target market. ‘‘Obey Your Thirst’’ commercials were ‘‘liked a lot’’ by 18 to 24 year olds, according to the weekly consumer poll Ad Track, conducted by USA Today. Unfortunately for Sprite, sales fell 3 percent in 2004, and its overall 5.7 percent share of the soft-drink industry was dwindling.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
After Lowe & Partners created the ‘‘Obey Your Thirst’’ campaign in 1994, Sprite enjoyed strong market growth into the late 1990s. It was the fastest-growing Coca-Cola brand in 1997 and sold 6 percent more cases over the previous year. By 2001, however, sales had begun to wane, and Coca-Cola executives feared that Sprite and other Coca-Cola brands were falling out of style with the younger crowd. Hoping a different ad agency would reenergize its lemon-lime brand, Coca-Cola awarded its Sprite advertising account to Ogilvy & Mather in 2001. To bolster Sprite’s image Coca-Cola also paid NBA superstar Kobe Bryant to endorse the lemon-lime soft drink. Bryant was featured in commercials that used the tagline ‘‘Obey your thirst,’’ along with an additional tagline, ‘‘What’s your thirst?’’ Tom Pirko, president of the beverage-industry consulting firm Bevmark, told Advertising Age, ‘‘Coke has been attacked as being dowdy and ultra-conservative, so they want to stay relevant.’’ Sprite stopped airing commercials featuring Bryant in 2003 after a 19-year-old Colorado woman accused him of rape.
The 2003 television spot ‘‘Rikkia’’ was the first Sprite advertisement released by Ogilvy & Mather. It featured the race-car star Rikkia Miller speeding around the racetrack to music by the rock group the Donnas. Miller also provided a voice-over for ‘‘Rikkia’’ in which she explained her love for racing. Just before drinking a Sprite at the spot’s conclusion, Miller looked into the camera and asked, ‘‘What’s my thirst?’’ Sprite’s sales jumped 12 percent in the second quarter of 2003 after the brand released its new flavor Sprite Remix, a lemon-lime soda with a twist of tropical fruit ‘‘Sprite is a great brand, but it has been in decline for several years. It badly needs a shot in the arm,’’ John Sicher, editor and publisher of Beverage Digest, an industry publication, told the Dow Jones News Service. ‘‘Remix will help, but additional aggressive steps are also necessary.’’ That same year Sprite negotiated a $2 million-peryear endorsement contract with basketball all-star LeBron James. Hoping to regain relevance within its target market, Sprite in February 2004 released a version of ‘‘Obey Your Thirst’’ that featured James along with Sprite’s new mascot, a puppet named Miles Thirst.

TARGET MARKET
‘‘Obey Your Thirst’’ targeted 16 to 24 year olds. According to KPMG Consumer Markets Insider, a company that analyzed different industry trends, teenagers did not respond to advertisements in the same way as adults. Teenagers typically listened to ‘‘brand ambassadors,’’ young celebrities or fellow teenagers that established credibility amongst their peers. To endorse the soft drink, Sprite hired NBA star LeBron James, who was only 20 years old during the 2004 leg of ‘‘Obey Your Thirst.’’ The new Sprite mascot, Miles Thirst, a 10-inch puppet dressed in hip-hop clothing such as oversized watches, baggy pants, and gold chains, was also featured in Sprite advertisements in 2004 and 2005. ‘‘Thirst was the perfect choice for Sprite,’’ John Carroll, group director for Sprite, told the PR Newswire. ‘‘Not only does Thirst represent everything Sprite stands for, he recognizes and represents the aspects of youth culture that are inherent to Sprite drinkers. Plus, you couldn’t ask for a better last name.’’
Although Miles Thirst was an African-American puppet, the campaign did not solely target an African-American demographic. ‘‘Hip-hop is a $1 billion-a-year industry that could not survive on just black people,’’ Shawn Prez, president of the urban-marketing group Power Moves, remarked in USA Today about Miles Thirst and his hip-hop appeal. ‘‘When you’re making this kind of money, [hip-hop] has crossed gender, race and age groups. The white audience for hip-hop is much larger than the black audience at this point.’’ In 2004 white, suburban teenage males spent more money on hip-hop products than any other group, according to USA Today.

COMPETITION
Ranking third in soft-drink sales (behind Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, Inc.), Dr Pepper/Seven Up, Inc., struggled to bolster its own flagship lemon-lime brand, Seven Up, in 2004. Young & Rubicam Advertising had handled Seven Up’s $25 to $45 million yearly advertising budget since 1995. Initial campaign taglines touted Seven Up as the ‘‘uncola,’’ referencing the drink’s lack of cola, an ingredient found in Pepsi and Coca-Cola soft drinks. Next, the ‘‘Are You an Un?’’ campaign was launched, but it was quickly discontinued in 1999 after its appeal to 12 to 24 year olds proved ineffective. The sales of Seven Up’s 192-ounce cases dropped from 174 million sold in 2002 to 126 million sold in 2003. In 2004 Seven Up advertisements featured the tagline ‘‘Make 7Up Yours.’’ The avoidance of using ‘‘un’’ or ‘‘cola’’ was an attempt by Young & Rubicam to make Seven Up appeal to younger consumers unfamiliar with the cola reference. According to Gary A. Hemphill, senior vice president of the Beverage Marketing Corporation, which offered research and consulting services to the soft-drink industry, the drop in Seven Up sales resulted from the growing success of Sierra Mist, a lemon-lime soft drink sold by Pepsi under the tagline ‘‘shockingly refreshing.’’ After the brand was introduced in early 2001, its sales climbed 89.3 percent between 2002 and 2003. The successful new competitor prompted Seven Up and Sprite to rethink their marketing strategies. Sprite created commercials with Miles Thirst. Hoping to regain its slipping market share, Seven Up approached several different advertising agencies outside of Young & Rubicam.

LEBRON JAMES
Born on December 30, 1984, LeBron James was the youngest NBA basketball player to receive the Rookie of the Year award (2003–2004). The six-foot-eightinch forward, who began endorsing the lemon-lime soft drink Sprite in 2003, was one of only three rookies in NBA history to average 20 points a game.

MARKETING STRATEGY
In 2003 Sprite signed a $12 million dollar, six-year deal with the NBA Rookie of the Year LeBron James. Ogilvy & Mather also created a mascot for Sprite, Miles Thirst, a wisecracking puppet whose mouth remained closed while speaking. Reno Wilson, an actor who had frequently appeared on the hit television program The Cosby Show, provided Miles Thirst’s voice. The puppet portion of ‘‘Obey Your Thirst’’ kicked off on February 14, 2004, when three commercial spots, ‘‘LeBron,’’ ‘‘Two Sprites,’’ and ‘‘What’s Better Than Sprite?’’ aired during the NBA All-Star game. In all the spots Miles Thirst was shown in several different wardrobes reflecting hip-hop fashions. Ogilvy & Mather hoped the combination of James’s endorsement and a humorous Spriteloving puppet would compel 16 to 24 year olds to drink Sprite.
In the 30-second spot titled ‘‘LeBron,’’ James gave Miles Thirst a tour of his luxurious home. The spot mimicked the MTV program Cribs, in which celebrities allowed MTV camera crews to tour their houses. During ‘‘LeBron,’’ Miles Thirst appeared disinterested in James’s furnishings, which included a king-size waterbed and a plasma television. The puppet became suddenly excited about the tour when he noticed a giant Sprite vending machine in James’s kitchen. In the spot ‘‘Two Sprites,’’ Miles Thirst explained to curious onlookers why he preferred to have two extra-large Sprites in the cup holders of his movie theater seat. ‘‘Never be too far away from the big, thirst-quenching taste of Sprite,’’ the puppet explained The commercial’s humor hinged on the beautiful women flanking Thirst at the spot’s conclusion. The spot ‘‘What’s Better than Sprite?’’ featured Thirst challenging his friends to name one thing better than Sprite. Suddenly two beautiful women passed, prompting Thirst to rephrase the challenge: ‘‘Alright! Name two!’’ Miles Thirst ended each spot by demanding, ‘‘Show me my motto.’’ The screen then displayed the tagline ‘‘Obey your thirst.’’
Adweek magazine’s Barbara Lippert wrote of the campaign, ‘‘The set-up—a sexualized vinyl doll spouting street lingo—could easily devolve into an obvious, annoying, pandering and even racist attempt to getdown-in-the-hood-with-the-bros. Instead, it’s quick, funny and real enough.’’ Other critics were not as pleased. The Rainbow/Push Coalition, a discrimination watchdog group founded by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, accused the puppet of propagating negative African-American stereotypes. ‘‘We’ve had some conversations with Coke about Miles. We let them know that we think the character is ill-advised,’’ Janice Mathis, a Rainbow/ Push vice president, told Brandweek.
The website www.milesthirst.com was created for the campaign. Miles Thirst also appeared on MTV as a guest, and 1,500 Miles Thirst dolls were mailed to ‘‘key trend influencers around the country,’’ according to USA Today. In May 2004 Ogilvy & Mather released further commercials with Miles Thirst explaining Sprite’s ‘‘Thirst Out’’ promotion, in which consumers could win video rentals, digital music downloads, and mobilephone ring tones.

OUTCOME
Lisa Speakman, senior brand manager for Sprite at Coca-Cola, told Brandweek that the 2004 segment of ‘‘Obey Your Thirst’’ was the highest rated in recent Sprite history. ‘‘Our internal brand-health scores are increasing on the Sprite brand. This indicates the marketing is having its desired effect over time,’’ she said in April 2004. The campaign also garnered a Bronze One Show Award for Promotional and Point of Purchase Posters in 2004. Despite higher ratings and an advertising-industry award, however, the campaign failed to halt Sprite’s drop in sales. The soft-drink’s sales dipped 3 percent in 2004, according to Beverage Digest, a publication covering the nonalcoholic-beverages industry.
Sprite was not the only lemon-lime soft drink to lose sales in 2004. Seven Up was knocked from the list of top-10 soda brands, a change that many analysts attributed to the rising popularity of Pepsi’s Sierra Mist, a lemon-lime drink released in 2001. Sierra Mist sales grew 89.3 percent in 2003 compared with 2002. Sprite’s 2005 sales slump prompted Coca-Cola to end Ogilvy & Mather’s advertising for its Sprite brand and to discontinue its ‘‘Obey your thirst’’ tagline.