Coca-Cola may be feeling a little hard done by today. Its TV ad, ‘Be OK’, which launched with some fanfare in March, was today banned by the ASA for misleading consumers over how much exercise is required to burn off the calories in a can of Coke.

The 30-second ad was designed to promote Coca-Cola’s anti-obesity message. It attempted to show how you could apply the 139 calories ingested from a can of the fizzy stuff to an array of fun activities – dancing in a nightclub, walking the dog, or laughing like a lunatic, for example. The problem was, it didn’t make clear you have to do a combination of these activities to burn off said calories (the alternative, the ad suggested – in a clever bit of two-for-the-price one advertising – was to simply drink a zero-calorie Coke Zero).

Leaving aside the ad’s remarkable – if medically potty – discovery of so-called ‘happy calories’, it was, you could argue, a positive move by Coca-Cola to get people on their feet leading active lifestyles – of which a fiizzy drink with a famously secret recipe could form a balanced part. “The advert reached an audience of 39 million people. Ten people contacted the ASA about it,” Coca-Cola said in a snippy statement today.

What is a global fmcg giant to do, after years of copping flak from the health lobby, when its attempt to answer its critics is shot down by advertising watchdogs? “Totally ridiculous ruling by the ASA who should have told the 10 complainants to ‘get a life’,” ran one comment on The Grocer website today. “The advert is not misleading and is just having a bit of fun to help to promote a concept. It was never meant to be a scientific documentary. Just how stupid does the ASA think that consumers are?”

Coke falling foul of the ASA will be a warning to other suppliers attempting to play up the responsible consumption message while also trying to shift lots and lots of their products. Just this week, for example, Diageo kicked off a pan-European online campaign dubbed ‘Think How You Drink’ – complete with a video of ‘embarrassing drunken walks’. The fact it features people who are blatantly actors pretending to be drunk is distracting, and the jaunty music slathered on top makes binge drinking seem somewhat comical and fun – probably not what Diageo was intending. But the point is it’s making at least a gesture towards getting people to think about their consumption. We can expect more initiatives of this sort following the government’s announcement today it wants to encourage booze suppliers to do more to promote responsible drinking.

As for Coca-Cola, it says it will continue to raise awareness of “energy balance as part of our global commitment to help tackle obesity”, though it doesn’t have any concrete plans to run another campaign of this type. Indeed, the Be OK advert finished its run in April and the ASA’s ruling comes, as it often does, far too late to make the slightest bit of difference to man, beast or offended telly watcher. Which probably makes the ASA as unhappy as its ruling made Coke.

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