Coca-Cola Aims to Sell Sustainability, Not Soda, in Animated YouTube Pitch

variety.com:

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorThe people who once said they’d like to teach the world to sing now want to instruct it on how to recycle.Coca-Cola has over the decades used TV commercials to make consumers feel good about buying drinks that range from Sprite to Smartwater.

To instill similar feelings about recycling the many bottles and cans that contain its beverages, however, it’s testing a different tactic.Coca-Cola has enlisted science educator Bill Nye to star in a nearly three-minute animated vignette that is available to stream on YouTube and takes viewers inside the recycling process.

Nye, depicted as a being made from recycled plastic bottles, tries to demystify the process behind reuse. The idea, says Christine Yeager, who leads sustainability efforts for the company’s North American operations, is to get consumers to understand how easily soda bottles can be disposed of so they can be reused multiple times. “We are not just trying to sell Coke,” says the executive, in an interview. “We are trying to bring consumers into this idea of recycling with us.”  The hope, she says, is that Coke and Nye can use their social-media properties to direct consumers to the video, which they can then study and pass along.More of the nation’s biggest advertisers are talking with their customers about sustainability – and throwing out old marketing tactics to do so.

Last year, Procter & Gamble shook up detergent advertising, long the domain of housewives talking about bright whites, in favor of celebrity-laden commercials that urged consumers to use Tide in cold water to save money and help the environment.