Coca-Cola hopes to change the world with a three-minute ad.
The new advertising campaign, "Small World Machines," aims to use the soda's image as a communal, universal drink to patch up rocky relationships between governmental bodies in India and Pakistan.
The video begins with a simple message: India and Pakistan are not friendly.
"The relationship between India and Pakistan is one that has seen a lot of lows," a narrator says.
"It's stressful. It's tense. It seems it's not improving and it's getting worse," another narrator, who could be either Pakistani or Indian, asserts.
But the video ends with assurances of reconciliation. Peace will come-if we buy Coke.
Filmed in March, the advertisement set up two Coca-Cola vending machines in Lahore, Pakistan and another in New Delhi, India, reported the Washington Post.
Each of the machines bore a touch-screen and an interior camera. The two were connected, creating a window into the other country. Shoppers were invited to interact with one another by way of the 3-D screen, joining hands on the screen, dancing with each other and tracing peace signs and hearts that blossomed into green images of doves, leaves and moons.
Mall-goers lifted tall, red cans of Coca-Cola, laughing, taking videos of the spectacle.
"Togetherness, humanity, this is what we want," the narrator continues. "More and more exchange."
Coke's global creative director told Ad Age that the campaign meant to combine "the roots of Coke as a brand that started at a soda fountain-itself a communal experience," with finding, "new, open-hearted ways for people to come together, while highlighting the power of happiness."
This tactic, called "track two diplomacy," is not a novel one: brands such as McDonald's have used boiled-down, shared human social behaviors as conflict resolution for years.
Indo-Pakistani relations have been crippled by three major wars since the two entities split in 1947. In 1999, they almost spiraled into nuclear conflict with one another. Indian officials have charged Pakistan's intelligence bureau with supporting anti-India terrorist networks. The social scene is no different from the political one: polls show that Indians and Pakistanis do not trust and fear each other.
Spectators question whether or not Coca-Cola vending machines and their advertisement, "idealistic," as it is being called, will be able to patch up years of deeply ingrained political and geographical conflict.
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