Coca-Cola Commercial Made (Partly) With Stock Footage
The prove that stock footage is not something that’s only used in very low budget productions comes from Coca-Cola. Yes, that’s right, one of the biggest brands in the world uses stock footage in their recent commercial. Or at least that’s what it looks like.
Coca-Cola’s new world-wide ad campaign is titled ‘Reasons to Believe‘. The campaign focusses on the message that there’s more good in the world then bad. Their key instrument for conveying that message is this 60 second TV spot, featuring a child choir singing Candi Staton’s 1986 single “You Got the Love”. In the TV spot we see various images of something bad happening in the world, immediately followed by something good. Text overlays tell us that the good things always surpass the bad things. The spot is adapted to every country, showing events that are relevant to a specific country / culture.
What’s remarkable about this ad, is that it is really simple, it’s not flashy or stylized at all. The footage they use to show the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ events looks like it’s taken straight from the web, either as stock footage or user generated content. It’s not color graded or matched with each other, but just placed straight into the video. Also the titles are just plain white text, without any use of a lower third. Knowing Coco-Cola, and knowing that this is a world-wide TV campaign, they probably didn’t really took it from the web but just made it look like they did. But that’s not really the point, the point is that they wanted to express a certain ‘pureness’ in their clips, showing real people instead of over stylized images of way too handsome actors drinking coke. A purity that can be achieved by using the right stock footage.
So what lesson can we learn from this? I think the key message to take away from this commercial is that you don’t always have to stylize your images or have to give a video a coherent look. Sometimes you can actually use the visual difference to empower your message.
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