“Open Happiness,” as I recently became aware, was the name of a Coca-Cola ad campaign that ran from 2009-2016. (It was also the brand’s slogan during that period; Coke’s new slogan, “Taste the Feeling,” seems appropriately vague and dreary for the current era.) Upon learning this, I pulled up a couple of the associated commercials on YouTube, one of which made me check my cynicism, at least momentarily. There really was a clever bit of marketing/product design involved, in which a fridge full of Coca-Cola bottles was placed on a college campus, and the design of each bottle cap was such that it required the cap of another bottle to open it up – thus engineering some social interaction between the formerly standoffish college students.
Then there was the Cee-Lo Green-led music video for the song “Open Happiness,” which is so weirdly psychedelic in a way that manages to be both family-friendly and unsettling that I don’t even want to include a link for it here.
Finally, I came across a New Yorker article on the campaign, which dealt specifically with one of the so-called “Happiness Machines” that Coca-Cola set up around the world, many of which had the form of a vending machine but performed some novel function, like dispensing pizzas or acting as a bottle-cap operated telephone booth. This latter machine was the subject of the article, as Coca-Cola installed a series of them in a Dubai labor camp, facilitating an uptick in calls home from the migrant workers, at least until the machines were disassembled at the end of the shoot. The commercial, apparently, is quite touching, but as the article explains, not everyone is impressed:
“’For one thing,’ [said a researcher for Human Rights Watch], ‘Coke is not only using these low-income workers to advertise its product, it is also requiring them to buy soft drinks themselves’—at nearly a tenth of their typical daily wages, he pointed out—‘to use the special phone booth.’ On top of that […] the ads normalize and even glorify the hardship faced by migrant workers—at least some of whom may be working against their will.”
WHAT IS HAPPINESS? 