In the global advertising campaign called Open Happiness that was introduced in January, the Coca Cola Company takes the game to a logical last step by omitting any reference to the brand in a catchy song it created and sold last winter.
With the title “Open Happiness,” the song is an advertisement by association.
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Coca-Cola signed a crew of well-known band members and performers to record the single. It also produced several different language versions for other countries.
On Thursday morning, the song will take another promotional step forward when MTV is expected to show the premiere of the music video for “Open Happiness.” Coca-Cola said it did not pay MTV for the showing.
As is the case with the song, viewers of the video will be hard-pressed to spot the Coca-Cola brand. “I studied the video like the Zapruder film,” said a Coke spokesman, Petro Kacur, and the Coke reference “is so super-fast that you really have to be looking for it.”
Umut Ozaydinli, the global music marketing manager for the Coca-Cola Company, said the upbeat song pulled consumers into the Open Happiness campaign, rather than pushing it on them like traditional advertising.
“Coca-Cola is such a strong and magical brand that we can come out with something with no branding or very little branding,” he said in a telephone interview from Turkey on Wednesday, where the company plans to release a Turkish-language version of the song. “All the communications we are doing around the song enable consumers to connect the song with the brand.”
While Coca-Cola has produced songs in the past — before the Summer Olympics in Beijing last year, the company released eight song remixes by D.J.’s — “Open Happiness” stands out because the company is charging for the single on iTunes and Amazon.com. The musical strategy may remind some of “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” the jingle-turned-pop-hit that was first featured as a part of Coca-Cola’s classic 1971 commercial known as “Hilltop.” In the commercial, young people sang about wanting to “buy the world a Coke.”
“I think they have been looking for something that has that kind of impact,” said John Rudolph, the chief executive of Bug Music, which licenses songs for commercial uses.
Music is, of course, an important part of many advertisers’ messages. Last year, for instance, the R&B singer Chris Brown released a hit song, “Forever,” that doubled as a jingle for the Doublemint brand of gum. The song even incorporated the product’s slogan, “double your pleasure, double your fun,” into the lyrics.
Mr. Rudolph noted that few companies are able to afford the production of an original song that doesn’t even mention the brand. But if any company can, it’s Coca-Cola.
For “Open Happiness,” the company collaborated with Atlantic Records and signed Cee-Lo Green of Gnarls Barkley, Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy, Brendon Urie of Panic at the Disco, Travis McCoy of Gym Class Heroes, and Janelle Monae to lend their voices to the song. Ms. Monae, a Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter, said it “was promoting a good cause,” happiness, that all people could agree on.
Being able to work with fellow artists and “write the words and lyrics that we like without feeling like the company was saying, ‘Sing about Coca-Cola,’ it made it more true to my core values,” she said.
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The lyrics for the “Open Happiness” song are as sweet and bubbly as the soft drink. “C’mon and lift me up, it’s a brand new day, open up a lil’ happiness today, so I can be someone new,” goes the chorus. The single was released in the United States in March. Tying the music video to the Coke commercials for the campaign is the same five-note melody.
Mr. Ozaydinli speculated that the lack of an in-your-face Coke message is “one of the key reasons” consumers have shown interest in the song. On MySpace, it has been streamed more than 600,000 times.
According to Coca-Cola, the single reached the No. 1 spot on the top 100 music download chart of Baidu.com, a leading Chinese Web site.
But it has not found as many fans in the United States: it reached No. 37 on Apple iTunes pop chart for a short period of time, the company said, and no longer appears on the iTunes lists.
Mr. Ozaydinli acknowledged that the song did not perform as well in the United States, but said that “chart success is only one element of the equation.” Mr. Ozaydinli said Coca-Cola may sell copies of the single in some markets.
Coca-Cola said it would consider producing future songs for the Open Happiness campaign in the coming months. A half-French, half-English-language version of the tune will be released in time for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver next year.
Source : http://english.alrroya.com
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