Coca-Cola: A Bottle Love Story is Coca-Cola’s latest ad, a stop motion oddball animation made out of recycled plastic bottles. Via Adweek:
The tale borders on nonsensical. The bubbly dialogue, packed with puns about intrinsically mundane inanimate objects “bottling it” (British for chickening out) and getting “trolleyed” (drunk) together, is painfully cutesy, and strains under the weight of its own ridiculous metaphor. But the production itself—a stop motion featuring characters, props and a set all meticulously crafted from recycled plastic bottles—is nifty enough to carry the whole thing.
A making-of video is arguably more engaging than the ad itself, featuring execs from Coke and Ogilvy Berlin. Watching the production team cut up bottles and shape them into components from the ad is fun, even despite the usual dose of self-congratulatory glee. And the company’s claim that it’s planning to increase the amount of recycled plastic in its bottles to 50 percent (by 2020) adds the illusion, at least, of substance to the message.
That should probably be taken with a grain of sugar, though. It was an increase from a prior commitment of 40 percent, and made amid pressure from environmental activists, who are still not satisfied—which may speak to why the brand is hitting this message at this time.