• by Karl Greenberg , Staff Writer, December 11, 2015

The blowback from Coca-Cola’s Mexico ad has been scathing: Coke is daft to local culture, politics and the feelings of indigenous people. 

The first time I saw something like this was in the United States. Back in 2001, Toyota raised the ire of Jesse Jackson, among others, and risked a boycott when, as part of a Saatchi & Saatchi campaign, it distributed postcards showing an African American with a RAV4 silhouette on his gold tooth. There was also Chrysler's “Lingerie Bowl” incident.  Ford got blowback in 2013 when, days after the Indian Parliament launched an anti-rape law, its agency there ran an ad for the Figo car depicting three women tied up and stuffed in the rear storage of the car. Or how about Starbucks' “Race Together” weirdness/enforced humanism, and the ad that beats pretty much all of them: PepsiCo’s goat ad for Mountain Dew, officially, “The Most Racist Ad Since ‘Birth of a Nation’” (though, ironically, the Dew ad was created by an artist of color).

By contrast, Coca-Cola’s ad, in which “hipster colonials” uplift the Mixe Community Totontepec with the salubrious gift of a Coke, could have been directed by Daniel Ortega. But, yes, is just one more example of an in-country agency missing the trees for the forest. 

The forest is Coke’s global idea, and the Mexico ad looks like every Coca-Cola ad I’ve probably ever seen: attractive people offering Coke-bottle largesse. The fact that no one, no account manager or creative director threw a flag speaks to tribalism, and how we don't give enough credence to the insidious power of own prejudices. But it also speaks to how focusing on making creative choices cleave to global branding can lead to myopia. 

After all, Coca-Cola’s global brief tends to result in ads showing interplay between attractive people and locals, the former handing a Coke to the latter. Coca-Cola has, for years, been about spreading its message in a bottle: a Coke and a smile delivers global brother and sisterhood. 

An advertisement in which smiling young carefree people uplift “indios” with a Coke is not exceptional. One would almost be surprised if an ad like this did not pass muster with global marketing focused on the big message, and not tuned into the local portent of that message. Maybe global brands need someone in each market whose job it is to read beyond the tagline, to vet a campaign for tone deaf disorder, because that local agency is too focused on getting with the global program.