Potentially Offensive ad

This is an advertisement for CocaCola. They decided to reach their "target markets" by advertising for their normal cola on the stairs most likely with the thought that the people taking the stairs would be more likely to buy their regular soda because their burning calories going up the stairs, in a sense being active, would rather the normal. And in the same sense they advertised their diet soda on the escalator thinking that less active people should drink diet. This could be good logic sense there is a possibility that people taking the escalator may want diet but it is very controversial. They may have missed that people taking the stairs could be more concerned about what they are doing and eating and thus want to drink diet as well. This advertisement may have been talked about more but whether that was in a good or bad light I'm not sure. I would say that this was not a very successful advertisement by them because of the controversy it has the potential to cause. While this type of advertisement does have a sense of shock value, it could be the wrong type of shock. This advertisement does show that CocaCola is paying attention to the health of consumers and knows the culture of people becoming more aware of their health. It also shows that they are targeting specific types of markets, people taking the stairs and people taking the escalator. What they are missing though is that there are multiple reasons that people cannot take the stairs, such as if they are injured, have old joints, are not wearing the proper shoes, or many other reasons. This is cause for people to feel judge by the company or worse on themselves for things outside of their control. Coca Cola could have used many other ways to market to these two types of groups without being perceived poorly. They could have even alternated every other step with diet and regular and possible had a better response since it would be a high traveled area. They also could have just skipped over this advertisement and stuck with other channels of marketing.