Coke fights back with promotion of low calorie drinks

By CANDICE CHOI

AP Food Indus­try Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Coca-Cola became one of the world’s most pow­er­ful brands by equat­ing its soft drinks with hap­pi­ness. Now it’s tak­ing to the air­waves for the first time to address a grow­ing cloud over the indus­try: obesity.

The Atlanta-based com­pany on Mon­day will begin air­ing a two-minute spot dur­ing the highest-rated shows on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC in hopes of flex­ing its mar­ket­ing mus­cle in the debate over sodas and their impact on pub­lic health. The ad lays out Coca-Cola’s record of pro­vid­ing drinks with fewer calo­ries and notes that weight gain is the result of con­sum­ing too many calo­ries of any kind — not just soda.

For Coca-Cola, the world’s No. 1 bev­er­age com­pany, the ads reflect the mount­ing pres­sures on the broader indus­try. Later this year, New York City is set to enact a first-in-the-nation cap on the size of soft drinks sold at restau­rants, movie the­aters and sports are­nas. The mayor of Cam­bridge, Mass., has already intro­duced a sim­i­lar mea­sure, say­ing she was inspired by New York’s move.

Even when Pep­siCo Inc., the No. 2 soda maker, recently signed a wide-ranging endorse­ment deal with pop singer Bey­once, crit­ics called for her to drop the con­tract or donate the funds to health initiatives.

New research in the past year also sug­gests that sug­ary drinks cause peo­ple to pack on the pounds inde­pen­dent of other behav­ior. A decades-long study involv­ing more than 33,000 Amer­i­cans, for exam­ple, sug­gested that drink­ing sug­ary bev­er­ages inter­acts with genes that affect weight and enhances a person’s risk of obe­sity beyond what it would be from hered­ity alone.

Michael Jacob­son, exec­u­tive direc­tor for the Cen­ter for Sci­ence in the Pub­lic Inter­est, was skep­ti­cal about Coca-Cola’s ads and said the com­pany would stop fight­ing soda taxes if it was seri­ous about help­ing reduce obesity.

“It looks like a page out of dam­age con­trol 101,” he said. “They’re try­ing to dis­arm the public.”

The group has been crit­i­cal of the soft drink indus­try and last year released a video par­o­dy­ing Coke’s famous polar bears becom­ing plagued with dia­betes and other health problems.

Coca-Cola said its ads aren’t a reac­tion to neg­a­tive pub­lic sen­ti­ment. Instead, the idea is to raise aware­ness about its lower-calorie drinks and plans for the com­ing months, said Stu­art Kro­nauge, gen­eral man­ager of sparkling bev­er­ages for Coca-Cola North America.

“There’s an impor­tant con­ver­sa­tion going on about obe­sity out there, and we want to be a part of the con­ver­sa­tion,” she said.

In the ad, a nar­ra­tor notes that obe­sity “con­cerns all of us” but that peo­ple can make a dif­fer­ence when they “come together.” The spot was pro­duced by the ad agen­cies Bright­house and Citizen2 and is intended to tout Coca-Cola’s cor­po­rate respon­si­bil­ity to cable news viewers.

Another ad, which will run later this week dur­ing “Amer­i­can Idol” and before the Super Bowl, is much more rem­i­nis­cent of the catchy, upbeat adver­tis­ing peo­ple have come to expect from Coca-Cola. It fea­tures a mon­tage of activ­i­ties that add up to burn­ing off the “140 happy calo­ries” in a can of Coke: walk­ing a dog, danc­ing, shar­ing a laugh with friends and doing a vic­tory dance after bowl­ing a strike.

The 30-second ad, a ver­sion of which ran in Brazil last month, is intended to address con­fu­sion about the num­ber of calo­ries in soda, said Diana Garza Cia­r­lante, a spokes­woman for Coca-Cola Co. She said the company’s con­sumer research showed peo­ple mis­tak­enly thought there were as many as 900 calo­ries in a can of soda.

The com­pany declined to say how much it was spend­ing on the com­mer­cials, which it started putting together last sum­mer. It also declined to give details on its plans for the year ahead. But among the options under con­sid­er­a­tion is putting the amount of activ­ity needed to burn off the calo­ries in a drink on cans and bottles.

The com­pany noted that it already puts calo­rie counts on the front of its cans and bot­tles. Last year, it also started post­ing calo­rie infor­ma­tion on its vend­ing machines ahead of a reg­u­la­tion that will require soda com­pa­nies to do so by 2014.

Coca-Cola’s chang­ing busi­ness reflects the pub­lic con­cern over the calo­ries in soda. In North Amer­ica, all the growth in its soda unit over the past 15 years has come from low– and no-calorie drinks, such as Coke Zero. Diet sodas now account for nearly a third of its sales in the U.S. and Canada. Other bev­er­ages such as sports drinks and bot­tled water are also fuel­ing growth.

Even with the grow­ing pop­u­lar­ity of diet sodas, how­ever, over­all soda con­sump­tion in the U.S. has declined steadily since 1998, accord­ing to the indus­try tracker Bev­er­age Digest.

John Sicher, the pub­lisher of Bev­er­age Digest, noted that the indus­try “put its head in the sand” when obe­sity and soft drinks first started becom­ing an issue more than a decade ago. Now, he said Coca-Cola is look­ing to posi­tion itself in the pub­lic debate rather than being defined by adversaries.

Posted by Becky Brooks on Jan 16 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.