“Cola War, huh! What is it good for?”
Healthy competition and an excuse to write this article on the ongoing battle for our caffeinated hearts and sugar-addled minds between the two giants of fizzy beverage.
I’m sure Edwin Starr would’ve come up with something snappier, but he’s not employed here.
The battleground has changed since the 1980s. We no longer look to the highway billboards, the ads in National Enquirer or the million-dollar Bill Cosby endorsements on MTV to witness the blows each corporation delivered to its aluminium coated opponent.
Now the war is fought across a vastly different field. One that couldn’t possibly have been predicted 30 years ago when our sole interests lay in watching Michael J Fox climbing over cars in the rain.
We imagined future battles taking place on the moon, or via a Virtual Reality headset or at least a vaguely futuristic looking air-hockey table. We were wrong.
Social media is the modern day arena where all the most catastrophic shots are fired (we now call them tweets). It’s also where loyal troops are enlisted (we now call them Facebook friends) and collateral damage is a sad yet necessary outcome (we call it Google+).
So let’s see how these mighty warriors are squaring up to one other in the 21st Century and how much attention they are paying to the rules of engagement.