Dev Patel's Blog

Today we discussed Nike’s ‘Write the Future’ campaign during the FIFA World Cup 2010. We discussed whether it was ethical to intensively advertise Nike Football before the World Cup to divert attention away from $184 million sponsors, Adidas.

Building on that topic, a very similar thing happened between Pepsi and Coke. Coke was the official sponsor of the World Cup and just like Nike, Pepsi released a campaign including the biggest names in football to retaliate. The difference between Adidas and Coke was that Coke did a great job in fighting back.

Coke based their entire campaign around the ‘Waving Flag’ song which shot K’naan to superstardom during the World Cup. While it was a beautiful song which encompassed everything that the FIFA World Cup represented, the campaign lacked brand associations with big names in Football. When your target audience includes football fanatics all over the world, representation of the biggest stars needs to be clear:

Even before the World Cup began, Pepsi capitalized on the lack of Coke’s brand association (Pepsi has had long term contracts with the biggest Football superstars for decades). It was only natural for them to launch their own campaign that included relevant brand associations as well as music artist Akon, which sparked much more interest to the target audience!

 Was this ethical? As far as Pepsi is concerned, it was superior marketing. While it was Pepsi’s intention to divert attention away from Coke, or even capitalize on the gap in their campaign, Pepsi was well within their means to do what they did.

I was at home, in Thailand, during the World Cup and I will be honest – Coke was nowhere in sight. Pepsi ruled the build up to the World Cup and even during the World Cup, Pepsi was on everyone’s mind. However, Coke moved past the concept of ethics, and launched a retaliation. They built on K’naan’s success and continued their Waving Flag campaign. A ‘Waving Flag’ song was released in every Football fanatic country, in THAT language. Coke began to target specific markets of Football lovers, making Coke’s campaign a cult hit as opposed to a one hit wonder! 

I think the misconception of ethics in all advertising is well demonstrated here. Sometimes it is a company’s intention to ‘do bad’, but if it is within their means and they are just capitalizing on a mistake from their competitor – I believe it is okay.