Coke's protection of the polar bears with WWF, a tiny drop of money donated a big chunk to advertising it

"The more you text the more you can protect" says the polarbears.thecoca-colacompany.com page and directs me to check out Artic World. What is this campaign?

Coca-Cola is making an initial $2 million donation to World Wildlife Fund to support polar bear conservation work. Those who buy the white cans can text the package code to 357357 to make individual donations of $1, or donate online at ArcticHome.com. The company plans to match all donations made with a package code by March 15 up to $1 million.

reads the release at Reuters.

However the white coke cans were "killed" two months before their run-through date. Why? Because people couldn't tell the difference between the white canned "red" coke and the silver canned "Diet" coke. And it's possible that the youtube video stating the white coke tasted funky made people believe it actually tasted funky.

And lets crunch some numbers, Coke promises an initial $2 million donation , wow that's a great chunk of cash! Two million dollars over the next five years to the WWF, that's 400,000 dollars a year donated by a company where the annual profit is $749 Million. How super generous of you, Coke. That's roughly .05% of your annual income, I spend more than that of my annual income on ice-cream, and you spend more than that buying air time on the Super Bowl.

Look, the point is, when you're spending more on your ad campaign than you're donating to the good cause, you're doing it wrong. Also, we got sick of those polar bears in your ads around the time we started calling "computer generated special effects" for "CGI" straight up. They don't impress as much anymore simply because things have changed. Even blockbuster had CGI-animated animals in their ads, and look what happened to them.

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Anonymous Adgrunt's picture
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Chris Michael's picture

I hate those polar bears as much as the next Inuit hunter, but are you absolutely sure the $2m donation was more than what they spent on the campaign? As for the white cans, maybe "white coke" gave people the wrong idea about what they were actually buying ...

Dabitch's picture

I'm saying the opposite, the campaign about the donation cost more than $2m.

Since I don't actually know the exact number on media spend and retainer for the AOR that handles Coke Canada account, how about we do some math on the numbers we do have to see if this seems absurd?

There were 1.4 billion white Coke cans made for this campaign. In 2008 scientists calculated that roughly 20,000 polar bears are still around. Since 80000 aluminum cans make a ton, we now know there's (almost) 1 ton of white coke cans per polar bear on earth. ;p

So yeah, I think it's redonk either way. Even if the media was donated and the agency did not charge for their hours.

Good "white coke" joke. You'd think they'd sell more of that stuff.