Coca-Cola understands that it’s very hard to meet potential dates these days, but never fear, the Chinese arm of the giant has finally found a way for women to exploit their most endearing feature — perceived inherent weakness — to break the ice and meet a man.
The ad campaign, which has arguably achieved its task by doing the rounds online causing outrage on websites like jezebel, sets up a vending machine in the middle of the notoriously hard to crack dating scene of Shanghai, filled with “the same Coca-Cola you know but with one small difference.”
That difference is the cap is tighter, and a hidden camera monitors the machine’s customers.
Cue inherently weak ladies trying to pry open bottles with their dainty little hands and limp feminine wrists.
Luckily, some burly men, strong of wrist and chivalrous in persuasion, pass by the machine positioned in “the most romantic park in Shanghai”.
Completely realistic and unstaged scenes play out where the Coke-consumers-in-distress desperately approach handsome strangers willing to lend them a manly hand, and consequentially, in one case, their phone number.
Coke positions their difficult-to-open bottles as the perfect ice-breaker, and the message we’re taking away is that the perfect ice-breaker comes in the form of a cry for help.
“They may never know we did this and most of them will probably never speak again, however, the few couples we connect will talk forever about how they met,” the ad’s text reads.
Maybe not forever, but it does make for a cute story. Or a sexist one.
What do you think? Is this Coke campaign sexist, or just plain romantic and cute?
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