Always Coca-Cola, literally always.

Have you ever watched an advert from Coca-Cola in the last 2 - 3 years and not heard this little musical catchphrase at the end?

Not likely!  This version is from Coke's 'Open Happiness' campaign, which rolled out in early 2009.  As with many blockbuster ad campaigns it featured during the Super Bowl on 1 February, having debuted during American Idol the previous month.  The campaign had many manifestations, both on TV, cinema and radio, as well as in print advertising and other formats.  

'Open Happiness' replaced Coke's long running 'Coke side of life' campaign. The Wieden + Kennedy advertising agency were responsible for the creative work on the new programme.  The original music was written for the ads, but was later expanded and re-recorded before being released as a single - the version we link to here.

Later there were Spanish language and Chinese (Cantonese) versions released, while a French Canadian recording was used during the Winter Olympic Games torch relay in Vancouver in 2010.  Then came Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese and Indonesian versions. In this way the music (which did well in the popular music charts in many countries) rolled out alongside the marketing.  This repeats the success that Coke had in 1971 with their ad 'I'd like to teach the world to sing'.  We will be talking about that later in the series.

A later TV commercial (early 2011) called 'Heist' featured classical music - Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.  However, as is common with Coke advertising, the ad signs off with it's sonic logo.  This is a little musical motif (usually only about 1 - 5 seconds long) which a consumer would automatically associate with the product. (Coke's past sonic logos include "Always Coca-Cola"). Other examples of famous sonic logos include McDonalds and Intel Inside.

 The 'Heist' campaign was a multi-media effort, and tied in with Coke's growing involvement in social media, with promotions running on Facebook and other platforms.  This enabled the company to get additional customer engagement via competitions and interactive games featuring the bugs from the advertising.  In 21st century marketing music is a major part of much wider multi-media campaigns that deliver audiences online as well as offline.

The 'Open Happiness' campaign is still running.  A winter version from Sweden, showing summer fields at a bus stop, was designed to go viral when audience reaction was filmed. This was launched earlier this year and has had nearly 400,000 hits. Listen out for the sonic logo at the end. 

There have been other examples of when Coca-Cola have cleverly in-corporated their sonic logo into the original song used, as shown in their 2010 "History of Celebration" campaign. This advert was used to advertise the 2010 Fifa World Cup (where Coke were the primary sponsors). By using music this way, Coca-Cola can essentially maintain full control of the consumers attention. Not only that but each time the song is listened to/ broadcast outside of the realm of the advertisement, the consumer would generally automatically make the connection to Coke all thanks to those 5 little notes... 

Well played Coca-Cola!