As IF Times

link Soda Wars: Michelle Obama tells kids to drink water | WashingtonExaminer.com.

I suppose it’s a noble thing to use your position of influence to persuade others to do good things.  Issues  and conditions that affect many people but which require financial support to ameliorate are worthwhile causes.  Jerry Lewis has been associated with the Muscular Dystrophy cause for decades and of course Pamela Anderson has been linked to PETA.  World hunger, AIDS, etc etc etc all have their champions.  When Nancy Reagan was the First Lady, she took it upon herself to fight drug use via the famous “Just Say No” campaign.

It gets increasingly harder to find worthwhile causes that haven’t been associated with celebrities.  Michelle Obama finds herself in this pickle and so initially decided to wage a war on fat, especially among kids.  The first pass was to introduce, actually mandate the creation of legumes and veggies onto school lunch menus.  Yum!  Oddly, children weren’t particularly fond of arugula and carrot sticks…go figure.

As this campaign is as successful as the humus dip at a Denny’s, a logical idea then was to make success easier to achieve.  How about the idea of drinking…water!  It would be much easier to point to statistics that will eventually show that the program was working, kids are drinking water! We do have some reservations about getting  kids to buy into this though.  Smart Alecs will say “Water? that’s the stuff they flush toilets with!”.  No doubt there will be expensive public service campaigns expounding the virtues of drinking water with accompanying instructions on how to do it properly.  Let’s see, right hand on tap, turn clockwise…do not overfill!  Pamphlets will be distributed in schools and billboards created to ensure maximum exposure.  Facebook pages will be created on which you can “like” water.  As an accompaniment, there will also be supplementary instructions on other confusing things that children may need help with.

Breathing for example: techniques for proper air ingestion.  Let’s not forget walking instructions.  There will be discussions on the necessity of alternating feet.

I hereby wish to contribute my suggestion for how to tackle the devastating issues of child obesity and water consumption simultaneously.

Let’s remove all water faucets from homes.  Let’s direct water only to large cisterns that regionally serve communities.  To get water, children must walk some arbitrary distance, let’s say 2 miles, to carry buckets of water back to the home for consumption.   In many African countries, they are way ahead of us on this.  We combine exercise with utility, sheer genius.  Have you ever seen a fat African kid? Sometimes the old ways are the best.

Next: breathing in and out. And walking tips, is it necessary to alternate feet?

link Live Positively.

Decades ago, Coca Cola adopted the song “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing” by the New Seekers as part of their corporate advertising campaign.  It was a smash hit and so began the ingenious marketing program for Coca Cola which paired their product with subliminal feel good associations.  Drink coke= save the world, peace love etc etc.  Ok, seems reasonable.

Over ensuing generations the ads changed, but the underlying message was the same.  The Mean Joe Greene superbowl ad is still widely hailed as a fan favorite and even the quizzical campaigns involving cartoon polar bears was about being social and having fun.

Something must have happened at the ad agency because the recent tone of their ads has gone absolutely Bloomberg.  Consumers will notice that the tone is  less Madison Avenue and more Jewish grandmother.  Instead of saying that “Coke is it”, or preaching world peace with every bottle, they are now essentially saying that Coke is only a small part of a sensible diet combined with other intelligent food choices.  Try to write that into a jingle. Their own website is downplaying their flagship product in favour of promoting their diverse line of  other healthy ‘lifestyle’ choices.  They may as well have a skull and crossbones on their logo is the implication.

Is this a good idea? Do people want to have a figurative finger wagging in their face when they consume a fizzy drink? Do they attach a stalk of brocolli to each bottle to make everyone feel better about having a coke?  It’s hard to say whether the company is a pioneer in their marketing or are only responding to the dumbing down of society.  In fact there are many subtexts of ‘responsibility’ or of ‘greenness’ in the marketing of all manner of products today. “Organic” and “fair trade” are common labels for all kinds of things which presumably assuage consumers’ latent guilt.  Are they pre-emptively mounting a propaganda campaign to counter possible regulation of all obesity causing products?  Coca Cola does have a history of knuckling down to public pressure (http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/06/business/la-fi-mo-coca-cola-kraft-alec-20120406).

Or is the head of the ad campaign in fact a Jewish grandmother?  Other companies, notably the makers of Cialis are more forthright about what their products are for and don’t obfuscate their ads with preachy admonitions to use protection or to keep the noise down to protect the neighbours.  We don’t see car ads reminding people to observe all traffic rules and to wear seat belts.  We don’t see ads for women’s makeup such as Maybelline include warnings about being too slutty after an over application of their products.

Why does Coca Cola feel the need to cater to the weenie crowd?  They have a franchise and they have a cachet.  They should not screw with their recipe for success as was painfully proven by their ill fated foray into ‘New Coke’.  If they’re not careful, people will change their consumption habits just to avoid their preachiness.  At bars, people will order rum and Pepsis.  It doesn’t sound the same, but at least it comes without sanctimony.