What Liberals Can Learn From Coca-Cola’s Massive Advertising Budget

Have Some Liberalism And A Smile

Coca-Cola has been a product on the market for 137 years following its introduction in 1886. There are very few people on all seven continents of the world who haven’t tasted Coke and formed some sort of opinion on Coke. Maybe they love it. Maybe they hate it. Maybe they only like one type of Coke (Diet Coke) and maybe they absolutely loathe another variety of Coke (Cherry Coke). But with very very very few exceptions, everyone knows what Coca-Cola is.

Yet despite this, Coke spends an average of $4 billion per year advertising their product. The least they have spent over the last ten years was $2.7 billion in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. So even in a year where most of the public spent a significant amount of time indoors and away from each other, Coke still spent several billion to remind us all to pick their variety of sugared water over Pepsi and their other rivals.

I take note of this fact to counteract the argument that I hear from far too many people that it is perfectly reasonable for the Democratic Party to completely fall of the radar for years at a time. This remark has come in the context of my praise for the party, particularly the @BidenHarrisHQ social media account, which has been constantly pumping out all manner of content since about around the time that President Joe Biden delivered this year’s State of the Union speech.

I have contrasted this high level of engagement and narrative-setting that has been reflected in the rest of the media, with the failure to do this kind of thing more or less all the time.

The response essentially makes the case that people aren’t paying attention to politics all the time and that they won’t remember political arguments if they are made too early in the political cycle.

Here I will point out once again that Coca-Cola spends $4 billion per year to relentlessly pound their brand into the brains of the public, year-round. They don’t just advertise during the Super Bowl, the Olympics, and the World Cup, when billions are tuning in. Coke gets their message out in innumerable ways – digital ads, tv commercials during every kind of programming, billboards, those annoying ads before a movie starts – all of it. Because they want you to buy sugar water. So does Pepsi and the rest of the soda companies.

In that context, I would argue that political messaging is far more important than sugar water, and it would be nice to have liberals – and this largely means the Democratic Party – making something approaching the level of effort that the sugar water people put into messaging.

The argument that people forget things about politics is true, but that doesn’t mean less messaging needs to be done. It’s an argument for more. In consumer product marketing, saturation advertising is meant to impact consumers at that crucial moment when they’re in the supermarket aisle, ready to make their purchasing decision.

People don’t just buy Coke because they’re thirsty at the moment, and it often isn’t because they prefer the taste over Pepsi. Coca-Cola spends that $4 billion+ every year because they want people to associate a good time, a good experience with their brand. Think that ad was funny? Coke! Liked that musical performance? Coke did it! Liked watching your favorite sports team win (or in my case, lose)? Coke! Coke repeatedly associates themselves with positive dopamine hits throughout the year so that people fill up their carts with their black liquid.

For liberalism, this means making the connection between liberal policy and improvements in people’s lives all the time, not just a few months before November in even-numbered years. Like that bridge that Biden got fixed in 2023? Thank the Democrats! Like those jobs Barack Obama’s policies produced in 2011? Thank the Democrats!

And of course, this works in the opposite direction as well. It’s not just limited to election years for liberals to make clear what a mess conservative ideas are. The Republican-appointed Supreme Court decision to kill Roe vs Wade didn’t have an effect that only lasted up until the 2022 election. It created a nightmare for millions of people in 2023 that continues until right this moment, and it’s the kind of salient message that should be repeated – not just come election time.

Year round political messaging lays the groundwork for the more intense messages that pop up in an election year. But instead of seemingly coming out of nowhere sometime in August, instead the public will be primed to receive the new version of an existing message with repetition.

Unfortunately, Republicans understand this already and are quite good at it. Before Biden was even sworn into office, they began to blame him for an “open border” and a “surge” in crime. Neither one of these things were real but especially absent a Democratic counterargument and with a complicit mainstream media, they have come to be lodged in the brains of far too many people, and not just MAGA cultist diehards.

True, there is the real possibility that all of these falsehoods won’t work and ultimately Biden and Democrats will overcome it, but shouldn’t the party and the wider liberal ideological movement do everything they can so that there isn’t a crisis in every election year?

Why not use the mechanics of what works for Republicans to spread lies and disinformation and use those very same (or similar at least) techniques to tell the truth?

In 1930s and 1940s Germany, Hitler used effective propaganda to convince his fellow Germans to commit some of the worst atrocities in all of human history. Was it then bad for the allies, particularly the United States, to use propaganda to unite the country after Pearl Harbor to defeat Germany and the rest of the Axis? Were the tools of simple messaging and mass communication, as seen in drives for war bonds and war production and in FDR’s fireside chats, immediately tainted as “bad” because Hitler and his henchman Joseph Goebbels used similar techniques to sell the worst things in the world?

Of course not.

Coca-Cola spends a lot of time and money to sell us a product that isn’t even very good for us. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with liberals using the same saturation-based goals to sell the public on very good ideas, notions, and figures who can implement those ideas.

Frankly, it would be a travesty to do otherwise, and it has been.

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— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Threads @owillis1977

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