Danny G of AdPulp has discovered the slightly creepy website of The Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness. It has a Ministry-of-Truth-like quality and turns out to be an outpost of Coca Cola complete with a logo that feels like a cross between Coke and some strange religious sect. Danny says
But this site an ersatz hydration nutrition portal with a MD advisory board and all, is just weird. Sections entitled “Are You Thirsty?” and “Hydration and You” in particular crack me up.
For me, it’s fairly typical of the way corporates are struggling to deal with changing attitudes, splintering off these odd outposts whilst trying to carry on regardless with their mainstream activities.
It reminds me of the flailing efforts of sugar-laden Sunny Delight to get away from an avalanche of bad publicity, which I wrote about here. Their “Real World Kids” site since vanished. Bizarrely, if you click to realworldkids.com you now get a page about Bold 2in1 Liquitabs. (Some of the decayed remains are preserved in this google cache) P&G sold the company off, and I see that the new owners have created a new iteration of the fan dance.
