What A Waste.

h\t Nicole Yershon.

There's a campaign running in people's feeds on LinkedIn for Coca-Cola. I doubt it's real in any real way. Rather, it's a contrivance spread and spread and spread by a variety of red hagiographers, bent on pretending there's life and substance left within Oafilvy, after they fired everyone with life and substance and replaced them with either an AI bot or an $800,000 per annum figurehead.

The work, to my eyes, about 3000-percent too inscrutable to be comprehended my anyone with a mere three-digit IQ. Frankly, I don't even get it. I can't get from a twisted logo to recycling but maybe that's just me. Further, I can't believe the Coca-Cola company is truly spending massive amounts of money on outdoor which, according to my LI feed, anyway, they're pretending is just this side of ubiquitous.

But my real disgust at this work isn't that I don't understand it. It's that it's a lie. 

78 million metric tons of waste translates into roughly 172 billion pounds of garbage.
Roughly the weight of 500 Empire State Buildings.

Coke turns out literally thousands or tens of thousands of plastic bottles literally every minute. The most-optimistic estimates of plastic recycling says no more than one in three bottles are actually recycled. In other words, about 30-percent of plastic bottles don't wind up in our oceans, landfills or bloodstreams.

Actually, the work, I believe, is a lie or, better, is two-counts of lying.

First is the lie that the ad is a real ad. That it actually ran in a real way. Not just one billboard then galloping around the world via the closed community of a social network, then Cannes, etc.
(When the ad industry was important, it wasn't about awards, it was about measurable gains, aka sales.)

Second, the message itself is a lie. Coke ain't recycling plastic. In part because plastic can't be recycled. Plastic is a bit like nuclear waste. Its side-effects last lifetimes, or hundreds of lifetimes. 

Most distressing about all this, at least to my old-person's way of thinking, is that brands and their agencies are lying, and there's no independent press to point out the lies. The "media" can't. Because they want Coke's ad dollars.

What's more, normal people, i.e. anyone but me, no longer question the bushwa put out by giant companies. We look at crap like the lying Coke ads above, and we say, "wow! That's Cannes worthy."

No one even realizes that the financial holding company that owns the Cannes Awards (the for-profit Cannes Awards) is also a major investor in many of the holding companies that spend millions supporting the Cannes Awards.

Now, that's recycling. A dollar spent on an award show goes to the people who own you, and they give you a 19-cent trophy in return, then let you claim the awards as part of your new business spiel.

It's pay to play.

Or better, lie to die.