Wednesday, August 30, 2000

By BILLY MURPHY
Laugh Lines

Yeah, Coca Cola! Finally, you found a way to turn a parent’s addiction into a child’s future. If you haven’t heard, Coke’s new marketing plan will establish college savings accounts for children that can be built up through the purchase of their beverage products. Now that’s fizzy, man. It’s a bold new world out there and Coca Cola Company is not one to rest on their sucrose. They are leading the new charge in creative selling.

This bold new advertising campaign could very well change the face of marketing as we know it. It could also give you cavities, make you obese and set you on a path that so many others like me travel: caffeine addiction. This “win-win” plan would mean money for your kid’s future and increased revenues for the largest soft drink company in the world. Just how much more Coke can we drink?

I already have excruciating headaches if I go more than 24 hours without drinking my personal favorite, the Diet Coke. And I’m picky, too. I can’t drink it from the can or the two-liter bottle. It has to be the fountain kind, like at restaurants or movie theaters. It goes down smooth. But, bizarre behavior has always been a side affect of dependency and there are millions of others, too, who have very strange eccentricities about the way they drink their soda pop. And face it, soda pop in the south is Coke and we are all hooked.

No one at Coke or anywhere else selling such products will tell you caffeine is addictive, yet it’s not coincidence that every time I try to stop, my brain starts pounding like Jessie Jackson at a podium. Don’t worry, Coca Cola, I’m not going to sue or cry foul. I’m not even going to give it up. I’m too old to let go of a chemical that gives me that youthful “wired” feeling; the hyperactivity that enables me to thread a needle on a sewing machine while it’s running. At least now there will be some good to it all. My kids can go to college. Twice.

If only decades ago the cigarette industry would have thought of this plan. Then the doctors of today, trained with tobacco company dollars, could be treating their own parents’ lung cancer. Talk about the perfect cyclical marketing plan! Or, how about a portion of liquor sales going to driver’s ed. colleges where generations to come are trained to identify and avoid those who are DUI?

I can imagine the wordmeisters at Coke right now, coming up with the new campaign slogans enticing you to buy their drinks to get your kids into an institution of higher learning: “Coke, it’s the cerebral thing.” “Have a Coke and a Smile and a Ph.D.” “Coke is ‘it’ in MIT.” “Coke Adds Life, Calculus Multiplies and Divides.” and for college spring breaks: “Thongs Go Better with Coke.”

Whether Coke’s new marketing plan will make a difference or not, it will take years to know. Or, it might quickly be shoveled next to the little known, closet-sized exhibition at the company’s Atlanta museum called “’New Coke’: How 40 Long-Term Executives Got Fired.” Either way, we’ll all keep drinking and my head’ll stop pounding.

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