Hard To Believe The "It's Beautiful" Coca-Cola Ad Is Controversial

But it is!

There has been a vigorous discussion regarding the ad over on Nick Gerlich's Facebook page (Gerlich is a Marketing professor, so it's right up his alley). Most of the negatory posts concern whether a potentially-controversial ad should be aired at all when it should have been known in advance that there might be trouble.

I maintain that controversy was the point. Pepsi and Coca Cola are locked in eternal combat, and it's hard to make an advance without taking risks.

Besides:

"The average Mexican drinks more Coke products than the average American, British, Indian, and Chinese combined. On average, Mexicans drink 665 servings of Coke products each year. Americans drink 399, British 202, Chinese 32, and Indian 9 -- which comes out to 642 servings"

I went hunting for Australian Coca-Cola controversies involving ethnicity or nationalism. They've had controversies involving environmentalism, gay marriage, and casual sex, but so far have avoided others (witness a studious avoidance of aborigines or immigrants in their ads). This is about the closest, where a potentially-controversial rhetorical question is posed (and answered) but as far as I know, not controversial:



[Update 1: Highly-amused that at least one image in the extended highly-controversial Superbowl Coca-Cola ad is taken from the immediate neighborhood of "Breaking Bad" sites in Albuquerque, NM (4th & Pacific SW: h/t Miguel S. Jaramillo), and there may be others. I was a supporter of this ad before, but now I'm a raging supporter!]

[Update 2: Continuing to stoke the New Mexico patriotic theme in the extended Coca-Cola video:

Stop and Eat Drive-In, Highway 84/285 & Oñate, Española, NM.

Moonlight Rollerway, 5110 San Fernando Rd., Glendale, CA.]

[Update 3: Still annoyed by the fairly-xenophobic reaction to the Super Bowl Coca Cola ad. One of the singers, Christy Bird, is from Santo Domingo Pueblo, New Mexico. She sings America the Beautiful in Keres, a language only spoken there:

Many in the Native American community are rallying around Christy Bird, who sang in the Keres language in the commercial, saying they’re proud of what she did.

Several of the scenes in the extended ad were filmed in New Mexico. It's part of the United States! It's been a state for a century! Widen your horizons a bit!]