Coca Cola Ad Summary

Introduction

Companies invest substantial shares of their marketing budget into advertising. In 2010, for example, Coca Cola spent USD 2.9 billion on worldwide advertising (The Coca Cola Company 2011: 63) while global advertising spending increased by 10.6% to USD 503 billion (The Nielsen Company 2011). Despite the fact that investments in online media are predicted to continually rise (between 2009 and 2013 from 12.8 percent to 18.3 percent of overall advertising spending). This clearly reveals that even though the world is turning online - the lion's share of advertising is constantly invested in offline media.

Discussion

One implication of the findings about global and local contention in advertisements relates to the standardization versus adaptation debate of international advertising. In this case, when local traditional culture is so different in some aspects from global culture or the culture of the country where the original ads were created, adaptation would probably be the better way to go, especially if the goal is to fit a product into the local traditional culture. From a conceptual/theoretical perspective, the findings about global and local contention in advertisements suggest that the global culture concept is a fallacy, and moreover, global brands are treated/used differently in different countries. For example, Coca Cola, one of the most successful global brands in South Africa and Nigeria, is well known for its Fanta products. In the United States, the Fanta brand is far less popular. Here we see a global brand, widely popular in South Africa and Nigeria, but with different products from its line.

The main question which arises here is that what are the elements of effective global and local traditional socio political stands in advertisements? An effective socio political stance (global or local) must enhance the firm's brand image, and it should have the potential to establish the brand as iconic. In addition, an effective socio political ...