Rooney loses his Coke Deal – but should Coke have put up with him?

Wayne Rooney has had his connection with the Coca Cola Company severed, after what seems like several months of gardening leave since a scandal-ridden 2010. Coca Cola will have rightly thought that he’s not really “Open Happiness” material, what with his ugly tattoos and aggressive, stubbly face.  He’s been embroiled in scandals of varying seriousness, involving fraternising with prostitutes (but he did that already, as we all knew- who could forget the Auld Slapper?!), urinating in the street, smoking, and latterly, using foul language within a supposedly criminally small distance of a TV camera. 

But he wasn’t an ambassador for Coca Cola, he was brand ambassador for Coke Zero, and in that role I liked him. It’s patronising to describe him as “gritty”, of course, but it’s pretty accurate – and Coke Zero seemed to be all about ramping up masculinity to the maximum to get guys to drink something a bit like Diet Coke. Guys can’t drink Diet Coke, of course, because their mind starts playing Etta James’ I Just Wanna Make Love To You, and they can’t help worrying that they’re sending out the wrong signals to any glistening, ripped men who may be cleaning the windows at the time (I’ve never seen window cleaners like that. Maybe I would if I drank Diet Coke?) 

Rooney meant Coke Zero’s masculinity didn’t just escalate into action hero, superhero mode (which, let’s face it, most blokes would struggle to empathise with). It was grounded, realistic, and at the same  time a high-performance but a bit balding and ginger. 

The deal involved a TV programme, Wayne Rooney’s (or Coke Zero’s) Street Striker, which was pretty on-brand too. The essence of street football, Rooney’s Alma Mater,  distilled into fairly arbitrary tricks and set in classic urban situations – under a bridge, by a canal, that sort of thing – was a nice extension, which made for some decent TV. Not great TV, but watchable enough, and the kids competing on the show were always plausible enough urchins to feel a bit sad for them when they failed to get the football through the 3^rd hanging tyre and had to go home.  

It seems that Coca Cola – the master brand of “open happiness”, standing for everything joyful, have been trying to have their cake and eat it. They wanted Coke Zero to have its own identity – to be as masculine as Diet Coke was famously feminine – but they got spooked when their ambassador contravened their happy-clappy, Tellytubby-Land brand values. 

Managing a portfolio of brands like this is tricky, and the extent to which you allow your sub-brands their own identity is a difficult question to resolve. Were people drinking Coke Zero because it was like real Coke, but with no sugar? Or were they drinking it because it was actually building a decent identity for itself away from the master brand, one that was more about confident masculinity than it was about ‘Open Happiness’? Probably a combination of both, a nice combination of product benefit and consumer connection. I would argue that the Rooney connection and the TV show were better for the brand than the pretty crap ad campaign, which showed sort of action-movie clichés. I can’t even remember them properly, so for the purposes of today, that makes them crap.

Yet these days, brands need any help they can get to keep moving, to not be seen to stand still. Brand storytelling is a phrase used often, but rarely means what it should mean – a story has ups, downs, changes of pace, a beginning, middle, and an end (though brands probably aren’t interested in The End just yet). Rooney’s trials and tribulations were bad, of course, for him, his family, and for Coca Cola. But they knew they weren’t signing up a saint – that’s the whole reason why they chose him. He wasn’t, err, a Tiger Woods golden boy. 

Brand storytelling isn’t about writing a manifesto for a brand and hoping that will do. It’s not about someone crafting a monologue that tells people who the brand is and why they’re here – how many stories can you think of that are one-character stories? While Coke Zero probably didn’t want Jenny Thompson to be a character in their brand’s narrative (though she would have brought a bit of sexy to the story, something that Rooney sadly can’t deliver) Rooney’s ups and downs could still have brought some valuable realism to Zero’s brand. Trials and tribulations are what happens in stories, because they happen in real life. 

To my mind, the best thing for Coca Cola to do would have been to renegotiate themselves a cheaper deal with Rooney, and be prepared for more controversy (though hopefully for his family’s sake, nothing of the magnitude of the hooker scandals). Take him off his pedestal next time he gets into real bother, punching a granny in the supermarket or biting the head off a bat. But be prepared to bring him back – surely there’s no more masculine, Coke Zero-esque quality than picking yourself up from the canvas and fighting back. As it is, Coke Zero might have lost a valuable asset, though Coca Cola won’t be shedding too many tears.

Mirror plumb the depths of journalism – anyone shocked?

The appalling way that the three victims died in the case of the ex-Bulls flanker, Joseph Ntshongwana, and his axe murdering rampage in the KwaZulu-Natal townships this week (one was decapitated, another’s head was left hanging on by a nerve, there are no details of the third victim) is as terrible as anything real life or fiction could conceive. 

Yet the way this story has been reported is, in journalistic terms, as appalling. Here in South Africa, the story broke gradually, and to the SA media’s credit, nothing was taken for granted. One almost-victim who escaped reported that the axe-wielding Ntshongwana accused him of having raped his daughter, infecting her with HIV. SA sources were careful to stress that at this stage, there was no confirmation of this event having taken place, or even whether Ntshongwana had a daughter.

They were also careful not to name the suspect, for fear of how this may affect his daughter (if she existed).

The Daily Mirror, however, came out with a horrible piece of lazy, sensationalist ‘journalism’ – under the headline “Rugby ace held after rapists are murdered with axe”. At this time, the facts seemed to point more towards random killings, rather than systematic tracking down of a gang of rapists. No matter, the Mirror’s headline ran as above, slandering those who had died such awful deaths as rapists, and the killer as an avenging father.

The first paragraph read “A former rugby star allegedly butchered three thugs with an axe in a vigilante attack after they gang-raped his daughter.” Not “in the belief that they had gang-raped his daughter”. Maybe it’s less snappy. But it’s accurate. To be even more accurate, some mention should have been made of the fact that this gang rape may never have taken place, and at that stage it hadn’t been confirmed that the suspect even had a daughter.

Today, the SA police have confirmed that there is no evidence or suspicion of any rape having happened to any member of Ntshongwana’s family. The Mirror’s ‘journalist’, Adrian Shaw, had written a story without considering that the killer might just be a crazed killer, and the victims, one of whom was a security guard on his way home from work, carrying dinner for his family, innocent victims of tragically brutal violence.

Nice one, Mirror, you bunch of cretins. Particularly Mr Shaw, who seemingly checked no facts, and couldn’t care less what drivel he writes, confident in the knowledge that his readers are stupid and wouldn’t question it.

I followed this story really closely because I live in South Africa, and was interested in how all sources, both in SA and in the UK, were reporting it. The question is, how often is this happening in other stories, where no one is checking the minutiae of the story? How much of these kind of newspapers is total and utter irresponsible drivel?