Coca-Cola's Anti-Obesity Ad Pulls High Ace Score

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While Coca-Cola’s new TV ad addressing obesity issues has been labeled cynical or an exercise in damage control by critics, consumers’ initial reactions are notably positive, according to Ace Metrix.

Ace’s survey of a representative sample of more than 500 U.S. consumers, using its usual battery of questions probing perceptions to TV ads, yielded an Ace Score of 669 for the initial, two-minute ad in Coca-Cola’s “Together for Good” campaign -- making it one of the top five TV ads to break in the past 90 days (out of more than 2,000).

The ad was also 15% more effective than the average corporate branding ad (these ads’ average Ace is 581) and 24% more effective than the average soda ad (499).

The ad scored very well across all demographics, and particularly well in households with children (42% above the soda-ad norm, Ace Metrix reports.

In addition, the ad scored very high on both emotion and information, according to Ace Metrix CEO Peter Daboll. While ads that take a more informational or emotional approach (as opposed to a more product sales-oriented approach) do tend in general to score higher, few single spots successfully combine those two appeals, he says.

Ace supplied a few of the positive verbatim responses received through optional, open-ended questions, in which consumers described the ads as “very informational” and said they’d learned positive things about the company and its products that they hadn’t known. 

Daboll says the positive/negative responses ran roughly 5 to 1, and most of the minority expressing negative sentiments focused on the ad’s being too long, rather than questioning its sincerity or objecting to its messages. “For the most part, people seemed to think it was sincere,” he says. 

The two-minute ad began airing Monday evening on U.S. cable news networks. A second, 30-second ad in the campaign, called “Be OK,” which shows ways to burn off the calories in a Coke, debuted on “American Idol” on Jan. 16. That spot will also be aired before the Super Bowl, according to the Associated Press.

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2 comments on "Coca-Cola's Anti-Obesity Ad Pulls High Ace Score".

1. PJ Lehrer from NYU
   

   commented on: January 18, 2013 at 10:08 a.m.
   I'm not at all surprised that these ads were well perceived. I commented myself on the fact that they were well done. But the problem is that the goal of these ads is to excuse Coca-Cola from responsibility for their contribution to the obesity crisis at a time when we all need to be looking for solutions to this epidemic. I’d like Coke a whole lot better if they were spending their money making healthier beverages rather than just defending their existing product portfolio. http://pjlehrer.blogspot.com/
2. Timothy Allen from Ephrata Review
   

   commented on: January 21, 2013 at 8:52 a.m.
   Maybe it's because they know that there will still be demand and there is no reason to apologize for giving the consumer what they want.

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