Brand Battle - September

Brand Battle

Marketing asks a creative director to compare two competing brands: This month Victor Manggunio, group creative director at Leo Burnett, looks at two of the biggest brands in the non-alcoholic beverages sector, Pepsi and Coke.

Tasked in picking two campaigns to critique, I decided to choose rivals Coca Cola and Pepsi.

Actually the two rivals pretty much defined the soft drink category for me when I was growing up and I took up this task with much anticipation.

The first ad was a delight the moment I saw it. Coca Cola's Happiness Factory is a simple tale of the happiness and joy that goes into each bottle. All the magic and wonderment starts with a coin that goes into a seemingly ordinary Coke vending machine and triggers a long process inside where its actually a fantasy world of weird and wonderful creatures and characters making sure each bottle of Coke is filled, capped, iced and sent off with the exact amount of happiness and fanfare it deserves.

As professionals in this industry, it is much too easy to break things down to critique. Good production values, good choice of talents, nice proposition, clever twists ... etc. However, this commercial just made me sit back and enjoy it. In the end, it didn't tell me the world's a better place because of it, just told me a lot of happiness went into the product and left it at that. How refreshing, a commercial you enjoy watching again and again. Advertising at its best.

You can imagine my delight when I found several more versions of this campaign available on the web. One of which was a documentary style short film where the characters that work inside the vending machine explain their views on working for the company and the product they make. A lovely follow up and thoroughly enjoyable.

A third commercial was recently launched which in actual fact, is second in the series, carries on the fun of the adventures inside the vending machine. Without spoiling it too much for those who may not have seen it yet, the word ‘adventure' is your teaser.

Bravo, one of the very few campaigns around I said to myself, I wished I were a part of that.

The other campaign on my two-part task is Pepsi's More Happy campaign.

The two ads I watched were called Pinball and Beachball.

Both were produced with decent production values and both had clean storylines. Pepsi's brand position has always been the more energetic and funky of the two giants of the category and the ads faithfully display the difference.

Pinball is a story of a young man who takes a sip of Pepsi and is taken suddenly by a giant Pinball branded with the logo. This Pepsi pinball takes him wildly through the city and ends up in a stadium where he is given a score (presumably on the amount of fun he's had).

Beach ball shows an even more epic tale of a giant Pepsi beachball being bounced around by a cast of thousands (if not millions) worldwide, much like in a concert or stadium except on a massive level. The final participant in this world beachball game is a blue whale.

Although it's a produced faithfully to the brand and a decent amount of production value went into the ads to make sure they we not done embarrassingly, I still did not like them.

After taking look at the two campaigns again, I realized it was simply the difference of ads done with passion and ones done with a checklist of items to be displayed.

Where both campaigns had the mandatory drinking shots, one was done with a naturalness that went with the story; the other one was slotted in commercial to make the checklist.

Both had extensive branding featured in the idea, but one told you how much fun you would get if you drank it, the other just simply stated how much went into their product. Branding was natural in case of Coca Cola whereas Pepsi force fit a massive icon into their storyline therefore giving a hard sell feel to everything.

Although some may see this as a negligible difference, I think it was the key factor in why I didn't quite like the Pepsi ads. Old school advertising with modern packaging is what failed Pepsi on these ads and its ironic since they have always wanted to win over the new generation of drinkers. Coke wins because it genuinely wanted to entertain the viewer with their message.