Describe and Evaluate Media Products (P1 and M1)

Well-advertised product

Coca Cola are a brand of fizzy drink that has been around since 1886. Their range of products includes low sugar and caffeine free versions of the drink along with versions that have an added flavour such as vanilla or cherry. Over their 132 year history they have had to run a range of different advertising campaigns, each of them ranging in how effective they were. The latest of these is their Share a Coke campaign.

Due to being an established brand that has a large amount of sugar and caffeine in it Coca Cola had to try and getting people to drink it again. This is due to people being
Share a Coke is an advertising campaign that involved putting names on Coca Cola bottles. This is a long running advertising campaign (it has been running for the past 5 years) . It has evolved from names on bottles to locations, to emojis, to emotions on bottles and then back to names.

Coca Cola are an established band so this advertising campaign helped their sales because people wanted to get a bottle of Coca Cola with their name of it. It also meant that people would take longer to buy a bottle of Coca Cola because they would be searching for their name.

The aim of this campaign was to increase the sales of coke. This makes a change from their usual advertising, which takes place at Christmas and not throughout the year. This campaign was advertised on TV at its launch 5 years ago, to let people know that bottles with names on would start to appear in stores. Their target audience was everybody, this is because they aimed to get as many different names on the bottles as possible. Names that were missed were covered by nicknames such as “Mate”, “Sis” and “Champ”. And family relations were covered by bottles with relations on them such as “Gran”.

Share a Coke had a 2% increase in sales during the first year of the campaign. This shows that the campaign worked to help sales. The campaign also “reversed 10 years of decline in Coca Cola consumption” so it helped Coca Cola to grow from a point that they were at before the campaign. This is a decline that was caused by people becoming more health conscious and not drinking Coca Cola as much because it contains large amounts of sugar. This also links with the recipe for Coca Cola changing to include less sugar while still maintaining the same taste.

In the past when Coca Cola have changed their recipe it has been met with negativity, an example of this is New Coke which only lasted for 78 days before they went back to their original recipe. This is linked to the reason behind the 10 years of decline in Coca Cola sales because they have changed the recipe multiple times in those 10 years to make it healthier, which despite being a good change hasn't been good for their sales.

This advertising was consistent throughout their entire range of products because all of them used the slogan "Share a coke" and used the same font. Coca Cola had to create a whole new font for this because of trademark issues but by making a whole new font and calling it "you" they emphasised that the advertising campaign was about the people buying the drink, not the company that make it.

They are also continuing to change the advertising campaign in order to keep it relevant. This includes putting emojis on the labels, as well as turning the names into removable stickers that the consumer can peel off and then stick wherever they want. This means that the advertising campaign will spread even more because people are bound to stick them on speed limit signs and on completely random places. They helped to build the awareness of the change in the label by releasing a video on Twitter. This video was seen by over 3 million people, some of those people will likely have told their friends about the new bottles.

This advertising campaign works. One person on twitter replied with "I don't even drink soda but if I find it I'm buying it haha " This shows that people like having their name on a product and will buy it based solely on the fact that if has their name on it, even if it isn't a product that they like.

Coca Cola also offer a service that means that if your name isn’t on a bottle you can get a label specially printed and the bottle sent to you. You can also buy a range of Coca Cola branded merchandise to send the bottle to the recipient in. These include a gift box that has been custom designed to fit the custom bottle in it. They add new names every year, meaning that names that may not have been available in the first year could be available now that it's in its 5th year.

Comparison of adverts: Microsoft Surface Go & Samsung Galaxy Tab S4

Microsoft Surface Go

The Microsoft Surface Go is a cheap tablet with features that are also included on their more expensive products. It is advertised as a tablet that people can use to complete work on the go, due to it being powerful enough to manage it and having a good enough battery life for it to last until they can get their files off it or until they can charge it. It is able to use the surface pen, surface keyboard and surface dial so if somebody already has them then they can continue to use them, all of this comes together to form a versatile product that is an affordable entry into the Surface range. 

The aim of this advertising campaign is to make people aware that they are releasing a new product and to try and convince people that it is worth buying. They are targeting their advertising to people between the ages of 15-30 by doing it on Social Media. Their advertising mainly targets people who need a way to work on the go easily, but it also has a secondary target of young people in college or university because of the low cost to buy.

Microsoft advertised the Microsoft surface Go by creating a short 1-minute advert to introduce the product to their target audience. They used it to showcase key features such as the portability and price.

 They did this by using quick cuts and close ups on the product. Using a clear and easy to read font to ensure that the selling points are easy to read for the limited amount of time that they are shown in the advert. They also don’t linger on them, so if somebody sees it at a glance they will look back at the advert to see if they saw it correctly and then see a different feature instead. The most notable of these were the when they displayed the price that people may have expected and then moved it down to the actual price.  They also zoom in on key features as they mention them to highlight them more than just saying that they are there.

They made the advert short so that if it’s shown as an advert before a YouTube video, it can’t be skipped. This means that people who wouldn’t have normally seen the advert would see it, even if they didn’t watch it they would know that they got an advert for a Surface and would remember that they got annoyed by it. 

Samsung Galaxy Tab S4

The Tab S4 is the updated version of the Tab S3 that boasts improved hardware and more features than its predecessor. It is a tablet  that can be used for a range of things, this version boasts improved processing power and an improved screen for entertainment purposes. It includes an updated S Pen, more features and support for the future as the support for the Tab S3 is dropped.

Samsung started their advertising for the Tab S4 by tweeting that they were going to give details about it to get people exited about what these details would be. They then released details about it during a livestream in which they announced a range of new products including the Tab S4 and their newest phone. This helped to make people aware of it because they may have been watching the livestream for the Note 9 or the Samsung Watch and saw the Tab S4 as well.

Samsung then tweeted out a trailer for the Tab S4 that showcased the features of the Tab S4 to show people the unique selling points of it.

The main focus of this advertising campaign is to showcase that a new product has launched that is "the only tablet that lets you supertask". The word "supertask" is featured a lot in the advert, meaning that is the main feature that they are advertising. They let people know that it is not only powerful enough to multitask, but actually powerful enough to supertask.

Both products are competing with each other due to being release in the same month and being targeted at the same people. Samsung’s unique selling points for the Tab S4 are the ability to go into Samsung Dex mode (a desktop style mode) and multitask (dubbed “supertasking” by Samsung). The key differences between the Tab S4 and the Surface Go are that the Surface runs a windows operating system which means that the user can run any application that works on windows on it. Microsoft don’t really make a point of mentioning this as a feature because it is something that is present on all their Surface products. Due to them making a point about the portability of the Go you would think that they would advertise this fact more as it is a unique selling point due to portable products that run windows being notoriously bad.                                                        

Both products also have consistent messages for their advertising campaigns, with Microsoft's message being that it's cheap and has all of the features that you would expect from their more expensive products. With the background being the glossy black table that the Go is introduced on and flashing blue lights appearing in the background when a key feature is shown (the same blue used in the default Windows 10 background) Samsung's consistent message is that the Tab S4 can "supertask" as that phrase appears multiple times during the different adverts as well as having the different features appearing in the middle of the screen each time that they are focused on and a background that changes between black, gray and orange when a new feature is about to be shown.