Coca-Cola’s latest online video campaign pokes fun at everyone’s obsession with their phones, offering a solution to cure the world of its social media addiction.
The ad is a spoof, promoting Coke’s Social Media Guard, essentially the same pet collar a vet would use to keep animals from licking their wounds. Fashioned in Coke’s signature red color, the Social Media Guard is meant to help people refrain from staring down at their phones.
The opening scenes of the ad mocks how great social media can be by claiming, “It connects you to the world and the people you love,” while showing family and friends ignoring each other, looking at their phones and taking pictures of their food.
“But there are times when social media can get in the way of the real world,” says the voiceover which goes on to explain, “That’s why we’ve developed the Social Media Guard, it takes the social out of media and puts it back into your life.”
Using the theme music from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the ad ends with a group of friends sharing a coke and a smile while wearing their pet collars.
Coke’s not the first brand to use a social media platform to taunt social media users. Last June, Applebee’s mocked mommy bloggers, Twitter users and Pinterest users in its “Life’s Better Shared” campaign. Buick’s “Get Off The Phone” video featuring comic duo Rhett and Link is even more similar to Coke’s latest campaign, urging people to “Get in the Moment” by putting down their phones.
Released this week, Coke’s YouTube video has garnered over 420,000 views and earned write ups on AdWeek.com and Entrepreneur.com, as well as a thread on Redditt where one commenter pointed out a New Yorker cartoon that introduced the pet collar idea in February of last year.
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