Coke has long associated its brand with happiness — even dedicating entire websites to the philosophical meaning of the word, and calling the contents of a can of cola “140 happy calories.”

Now, the company is taking advantage of a happy coincidence — the fact that part of its logo happens to look like the Danish flag — to welcome people to Denmark, recently voted the “happiest country in the world” by the United Nations.

In honor of the Danish tradition of greeting arriving visitors by waving flags, Coke’s local agency, McCann Copenhagen, created an interactive airport ad that dispenses flags. Coke says it’s purpose is to “let Coca-Cola and Denmark spread happiness together.” The below video of a case study shows people’s reactions to the machine.

Little kids and elderly people jubilantly waving flags as loved ones rush to greet them, all made possible by Coke. We’d categorize this as a highly creative branding win.

The public relations industry has all sorts of niche specialties and compelling areas of expertise, but for those interested in branding — and packaging in particular — the news that Pepsi is updating its bottle design is a big deal. Packaging geeks are like Star Trek fans; they take what they love very seriously.

And they should. Brands ranging from Heinz to Chanel to POM to Maker’s Mark define themselves at least in part through their packaging. In cases like these, the public can easily identify the brand just by looking at the bottle. Pepsi, of course, wants to be a youthful brand — parlance for a hip and carefree edginess that hopefully sells itself to one’s equally cool peers — and hopes to leverage that image with a new “asymmetrical” bottle.

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You’ve probably heard that everyone’s talking about Coca-Cola‘s social media reveal this week. According to the soft drink giant, the fact that more people are discussing its brand on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube doesn’t necessarily mean that more of them are buying Coke products. But maybe “How many people bought a Coke after retweeting a call to action?” is the wrong question to ask.

In an effort to clarify its points and counter the media’s collective freakout, Coke’s SVP of integrated marketing Wendy Clark wrote a blog post arguing that social does, in fact, play a large role in boosting brand perception and audience engagement–which leads to more sales.

Her point, of course, is that the fact that data can’t directly link the number of comments on a Facebook post to the number of people buying Coke does not diminish the value of said content. This kind of “buzz” is only one part of Coke’s extensive branding/PR puzzle, which uses earned, shared, paid and owned media to encourage the brand’s ultimate goal: driving consumers to buy more soda in the long run.

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We would normally view this tragic story of a 30-year-old New Zealand mother of 8 who died of cardiac arrhythmia after drinking 2.2 gallons of Coca-Cola every day as something of a PR emergency–especially after reading that her family “had not considered her Coke habit dangerous because the drink did not carry any health warnings” and that her coroner recommended Coke add “appropriate warnings related to the dangers of consuming excessive quantities of the products” to all of its packaging. (The coroner also suggested that NZ authorities limit the amounts of caffeine allowed in carbonated beverages.)

But then we re-read what we just wrote and asked ourselves how anyone could drink 2.2 gallons of Coke a day, especially after she had “all her teeth removed after they went rotten due to excessive soft drink consumption” and gave birth to at least one child who was “born with no enamel on its teeth.”

Sad as this news may be, we now wonder whether Coke‘s follow-up statement expressing its “disappointment” in the coroner’s decision to link heart failure to soda was even necessary.

In case you hadn’t heard, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg won his battle with “big soda”, banning extra-large servings of sugar water via a unanimous City Board of Health vote. The ban will take effect in March, but this doesn’t mean the conflict is over–far from it. See, Coca-Cola may admit to making Americans fat, but the world’s biggest brand will continue to fight for its right to sell ridiculously oversized portions to anyone who cares to buy them.

Now comes the next phase–and big soda chose a very interesting PR approach this time by enlisting the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation to argue against the ban on racial terms. During the first courtroom arguments in the class action suit filed against Bloomberg and the city, representatives from these organizations argued that the ban would disproportionately “hurt small and minority-owned businesses while doing little to help health” and placing said businesses at a further disadvantage when compared to their larger rivals. Of course, soda also plays a crucial role in boosting obesity rates within minority communities, but we’ll just forget about that for now.

Here’s the real shocker: these groups don’t just receive lots of donations from Coke, Pepsi and other soft drink brands; they also give them awards for outstanding “corporate leadership”. This isn’t to say that social advocacy groups should be immune to the usual lobbying nonsense, but the completely unsurprising revelation does damage the credibility of this particular PR initiative while simultaneously diluting the larger and far more important mission of these civil rights advocacy groups. It’s very unfortunate.

One thing that does really bother us about this ban: it will exclude 7-Eleven, home of the famous “Big Gulp”. Why? Because, for some reason, the city can’t legally regulate convenience and supermarket chains (which are slowly smothering its classic bodegas). That’s just dumb.

We recently told you about the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) pulling a clever Soda Stream ad for allegedly “denigrating” the competition (i.e. Coke and Pepsi) even though neither company’s products appeared in the commercial. This over-reaction demonstrates a larger trend in Brittan’s advertising world — the ASA now fields a record number of complaints about ads, and the complaints just keep rolling in.

Did commercials become more offensive all of a sudden? Or is this less an issue of individuals being offended by ads than of organizations using complaints to further their own causes and companies trying to squash competitors by getting their ads pulled? (Hint: it’s the latter.)

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Yesterday’s Q&A concerned Teneshia Jackson-Warner‘s vision of a PR/marketing industry focused on “serving” rather than “selling”–or providing work that truly improves both the lives of a given brand’s customers and the communities in which they live.

It’s a tall order. Firms adopting Jackson-Warner’s model would move beyond corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects that are–let’s be honest–almost always designed to improve public perceptions of a brand rather than the lives of people touched by that brand.

These considerations leave us very interested in the most recent study conducted by the Reputation Institute, which asks whether CSR efforts are worth the time and money required. The study’s conclusion: In most cases, they’re probably not. As the Institute’s recent Forbes guest post puts it, CSR isn’t necessarily dead–it’s just “mismanaged.”

Interesting. How so?

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As PR professionals, we know that transparency is an important attribute for any marketing campaign or brand image. Embracing reality is a wise strategy–even if it means being candid with details that the public may find ugly, undesirable or disturbing.

A lack of transparency breeds doubt, suspicion and distrust. The public won’t remain loyal to any brand that greets challenges with obfuscation or employs evasive tactics when dealing with customers. Venerable soda brands Coke and Pepsi seem to understand these points, and they are now taking a big public relations step by offering calorie counts on vending machines that stock their beverages.

In the midst of a much-publicized obesity epidemic, Americans are prone to place blame–and hopefully reverse the circumstances that got us into this peculiar situation. This means the public is taking a closer look at what they put into their bodies and taking more responsibility for their dietary habits. In order to do this the public needs information to make educated decisions, and calories counts are a sensible place to start. Read more

We don’t know about you, but we feel like there’s something a little creepy about big-name brands targeting children. Sure, kids represent a huge and hugely lucrative demographic, but people—especially parents—also know that children need to be protected from the big bad world until they’re old enough to make their own informed decisions.

Coke, McDonald’s and Nike all know that securing brand loyalty at a young age translates into windfall profits for decades to come. Now the NFL has jumped aboard that primary school gravy train by advertising to kids through a direct, familiar and trusted platform: cartoons.

The animated series “Rush Zone: Season of the Guardians” will air on Nicktoons beginning November 30. The show, based on animated shorts that scored highly with 6-11 year old boys in audience tests, stars Ish, a young football fan who lives in Canton, Ohio (home of the NFL Hall of Fame, of course), and works together with various friends to protect the world’s most successful sports league from evil forces bent on “trying to capture the essence of the NFL.”

We’ve come a long way from Bugs Bunny and Spongebob. Read more