Thailand Adwatch: Rivals outspend, but Coca-Cola leads Thai recall league

Coca-Cola triumphs, while a popular energy beverage vanishes clear off the radar, as Gunjan Prasad reports. Coca-Cola's 'Zorb' campaign, piggy-backing on the summer heat, a local festival and school holidays, romped home as the TVC with the highest recall factor - but the biggest surprise was the total disappearance of Krating Daeng, March's most-recalled brand, from the charts. Witawat Jayapani, chief executive officer of Creative Juice\GI, the agency which handles the Krating Daeng account, expressed surprise at the result, pointing out that the latest spot for the energy drink had been generating positive word-of-mouth and press coverage.

by | 06/04/2004

"One possible reason (for the non-appearance in the chart) might have been the media placement," he said. "We launched the new campaign in April during the long songkran holiday, when perhaps people didn't pay attention to new ads. In addition, we booked slots for a 60-second TVC, but later decided to launch with the 90-second version instead. It was very difficult to re-schedule the April plan from 60 seconds to 90 seconds. Therefore, we lost out on (tying-in with) many good TV programmes in the April schedule."

For Coca-Cola, however, the brand's triumph was all the more rewarding in that it didn't have to break the bank to climb to the top of the league.

Indeed, Coca-Cola did not figure in the list of top 15 spenders in April, when rivals Pepsi and Kratin Daeng spent just over 36 million baht (US$888,598) each.

With the majority of the most-recalled campaigns being heavy spenders, investment appears to have scored over creative impact in the latest Adwatch poll. "It may be an aberration, given Thai's love of witty and amusing creative," noted an industry source.