Coca-Cola has been breaking all the rules of logo design recently. First it was embracing hand-drawn Coca-Cola logo variations around the world in the fund free-for-all that is its heart-warmingly inclusive 'Every Coca-Cola is Welcome' campaign. Now it's defacing its logo itself in an eye-catching series of billboard ads.
Has a rogue rookie member of the marketing team been taking liberties with the brand manual. Nope. There's a good reason for the madness, but it's not something that every brand could get away with.
The Coca-Cola logo is still recognisable, even when this is done to it (Image credit: Coca-Cola / Ogilvy New York)
From WPP Open X and Ogilvy New York, Coca-Cola's Recycle Me campaign depicts skewed and distorted logo designs that represent the forms of cans that have been crushed by consumers before being sent for recycling. And they weren't made by simply letting a designer go wild with the warp tool in Photoshop. Ogilvy says the creative team used mechanical presses and vacuums to physically crush cans and capture the real distortions to the historic Coca-Cola script logo design that resulted.
Thus, each billboard depicts a one-off logo variation caused by crushing a real can. It's a creative approach to promoting recycling: simple, effective, and it gets more attention than a more straight informative message might. It doesn't feel the need to tell us why we should recycle Coke cans, taking for granted that we already know that. Instead, it depicts recycling as a normal, routine part of consuming a packaged drink.
Of course, it works precisely because we know the Coca-Cola logo so well. The design can be skewed and contorted quite severely and still be immediately recognisable. And the fact that Coca-Cola's prepared to do this when brands are normally so precious about the rules for the application of their logos is part of the confidence that comes from over a century of market dominance.
Crush that can. The new Coca-Cola campaign in situ (Image credit: Coca-Cola / Ogilvy New York)
The campaign was designed to align with Coca-Cola’s World Without Wastestrategy. Amid controversy over the amount of damage its packaging does to the environment, it's aiming to make all of its packaging recyclable by 2025 and wants to achieve a one-to-one collection and recycling rate by 2030. Ogilvy says a documentary on the process will be shared later in the month.
Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.
