Monday, July 07, 2008

Pemberton's Coke

Coca-Cola is going for heritage with its new ad, evoking the creator of the drink John Stith Pemberton. This would appear to be a bold move. Pemberton, it seems,  was a morphine addict. He claimed Coke cured dyspepsia, neurasthenia, headaches, impotence and, yes, morphine addiction. One of its ingredients was cocaine. Coke is now loaded with high fructose corn syrup which, personally, I wouldn't touch with a barge pole. But I guess advertisers can sell anything. Coca-Cola once tried to sell us Dasani, basically Sidcup tap water run through the industrial equivalent of a Brita water filter. It was laughed out of existence in Britain. And advertisers are still telling us that sour milk with sugar has mysterious beneficial properties, a theory of Mechnikov's based on no evidence whatsoever. 

4 comments:

  1. If advertising had to be based on fact we'd have some very uninteresting advertising. Most printed ads would read like a article in (some) newspapers, not all newspapers of course because why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

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  2. Repeated testing over the years has proven that ordinary tap water is normally safer and that virtually no one can tell the difference. That hasn't put much of a dent in the sales of Perrier and a host of other marketers of alleged spring water.

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  3. Car registration number of the owner of the local regenswasser bottler in Morpeth, H2 EAU
    coco, your really Banksey, aren't you ?

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