You Know It’s Christmas When the Coca Cola Advert Comes on!
Coca Cola has been successfully using Christmas to promote its brand for over 80 years now. These adverts are so successful that even when logging into facebook mid November, my news feed was filled with statues about how “You know it’s Christmas when the Coca Cola advert comes on”.
However Coca Cola is not the only cola brand that uses Christmas to promote its product. Alongside its rival Pepsi they have been in what’s arguably the longest running competitive battle in the history of advertisement. So what makes the Coca Colas Christmas adverts so special, that it brings people to quote the same line time and time again “You Know It’s Christmas When the Coca Cola Advert Comes on”; when in reality Coca Cola has nothing to do with Christmas at all!?
Before the first Christmas campaign was made, many people believed that it was a summer drink. Coca Cola wanted to change the outlook people had on this so adopted the image of Father Christmas as its unofficial logo. Now Coca Cola claims to have changed the world’s view on who Father Christmas is. They claim that before the first ever advert was made, many people portrayed Father Christmas as being fat, thin, small, tall to even the image of an elf.
Coca Cola art quotes - When the name Santa Claus is mentioned anywhere in America today, the image that invariably comes to mind is the one created by Haddon Sundblom for the Coca-Cola Company. In 2001 this same artwork was used again for the basis of an animated commercial.
Since the start of the Christmas campaigns coca cola has gone on to create many different adverts using catchy jingles, polar bears and penguins; and in 2010’s advertisement they even used a more modern approach and placed the world in Santa’s own snow globe. Coca Cola has cleverly taken a product that has no relevancy to Christmas and turned it into one of the most recognised campaigns in advertisement history.
As well as the new campaigns they produce every year, the same famous “Coca Cola Truck” advert runs alongside the new ones. This advert is the most powerful advert Coca Cola has ever created. Many people immediately associate it with Christmas as they have been brought up with the theme tune “The Holiday’s are coming”, taking many people back to their younger days.
Looking back at Coca Cola’s Christmas campaign it is clear to see that they have cleverly taken a product that had no relevancy to the Christmas period what so ever and turned it into one of the most recognised campaigns ever to have been created.
