Comparative Analysis of Coca Cola and Pepsi Video Advertisements

It is clear that advertising always plays the most important role in branding and promoting. Even the two biggest brands in the world for the beverage industry such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi are still considering that ads are the best way to engage to consumers. And FIFA World Cup 2018 - one of the world's largest sporting event – connects more than 3 billion fans around the world is huge opportunities for promoting the brand. Therefore, the two most valuable brands Coca-Cola and Pepsi launched their FIFA World Cup campaign with ads video which focused on football fever around the world.

The first video ads is from Pepsi with the campaign "LOVE IT. LIVE IT. FOOTBALL” included the appearance of international soccer players: Toni Kroos, 4 times winner of UEFA Champion League; Marcelo, famous Brazilian defender; Dele Alli, British young player; Carli Lloyed, two time won Best’ Player of the year and especially Lionel Messi – legend soccer player who is playing for Barcelona. According to Gregory, music accounts for 50 percent of a commercial’s success (Gregory, 2015) and I believed that Pepsi video ads had been an excellent example of that statement. At the first 10 seconds of the ads, Latin music with energetic rhyme from trumpet and the opening sound of Pepsi’s can get attention from me and make I felt excited. The theme soundtrack for this video ads - Light It Up Remix by Major Lazer is played through video combined with the noise of fans on the street create an exciting atmosphere. Creativity is the soul of advertising and branding (Kokemuller).The art of football is to bring people together, in the video, Pepsi all-stars squad enjoy the moment play football with fans from around the world, especially Pepsi had created balls with blue paint inside, and players have to escape from the balls which are coming from many directions. Blue paint splash from wall to people but the high-energy football vibe still spreads out. From my point of view, Pepsi did great innovation when brought novelty idea – paint-filled balls into the video ads to deliver the key message “LOVE IT. LIVE IT. FOOTBALL”. Amo claimed that advertising that features a celebrity creates attention and generates awareness of the product (Amo).The appearance of Lionel Messi – greatest of all time football player brings huge amount of positive impact to Pepsi campaign, such as Messi’s fans like me buy Pepsi products with his image on the can. Frames with Messi image took nearly 10s in 1 minute video, I believed Pepsi had done quite well with the plot because they know that his popularity is high and with millions of his fan, Messi can positively impact consumers’ attitudes toward the ad to encourage the fan with the football vibe “LOVE IT. LIVE IT. FOOTBALL”. All the elements of this video ads are good connections from the music, the creativity of creating football match with paint-filled balls and especially the appearance of superstar Messi. This video ads succeed in getting the message across the audience and bringing to the football vibe, convince people to enjoy the moment.

The second video ads is from Coca-Cola partnership with McCann to introduce the FIFA World Cup 2018 campaign “Ready For”. According to More, the average attention span for video viewers is 8.25 seconds, however, at the first 10 seconds of the video, there is only the sleepy voice of Coca-Cola employee who is talking to Coca-Cola bottles. From the view of the audiences, I strongly believe that they will skip the video within 5 seconds because there is nothing too interested to keep audiences watching one-minute video ads. Through the whole video, there are many talks of people in Liverpool, Bogota, Munich, and Johannesburg in local accents about the journey of Coca-Cola bottles which make audiences get boring. Maliwauki indicated that color plays an enormous role in our ability to connect to an idea visually and emotionally. The video is sharing about the journey of Coca-Cola through many moments in people lives: happy, excited, sad, disappointed, angry which is so emotional, however, the video using the cool blue tone for the video and it makes feel calmer and relaxed (Cherry, 2018) meanwhile the purpose of the video ads is to encourage the enthusiastic ready mood for biggest football event coming soon. Besik suggests that a compelling story that is memorable and authentic can inspire action from audiences. Nevertheless, I have the feeling that the story for Coca-Cola ads is uninspired because of lack of twist, special point or climax which can make people recall about the video after watching it. Coca-Cola is an official partner of FIFA World Cup 2018 so that this video became quite viral, nonetheless, this is video belongs to another small brand it could be a failure. Although the key message at the end of the video – “show the world what they’re made of” is extremely inspirational, Coca-Cola had failed to deliver it to the target audiences – football fans due to the shortage of bringing football vibe into the video.