Okay, personal confession time.
I’ve sampled Cocaine. It wasn’t bad. Sure
woke me up pretty good, although I did feel a
bit skittish after trying it.
But hey, you’d expect that of an energy drink
containing nearly 300 milligrams of caffeine.
What you wouldn’t expect is that said energy
drink would also wake up the twin sleeping giants
of the press and politics, but inside, we’re
all addicts. Some of us are just addicted to the
sound of our own righteous indignation.
Within weeks of the product’s release, we’ve
seen Cocaine maker Jamey Kirby on CNN,
ABC, and in various newspapers and magazines,
including The New York Times. We’ve heard
about it from New York City politicians and the
ladies on The View, who had the good sense to
treat it with humor.
Kirby’s eating the publicity up and spitting it
out in profit. We don’t think it can continue,
because the drink is only so-so, but we do believe
that Kirby came up with a great way to get
cheap marketing, which is exactly what he wanted.
The more people who pile on, airing their
disgust, the more the avalanche of attention will
grow for Cocaine.
From what we’ve seen of Kirby, he’s slick
enough to say the right things about not promoting
drugs, having a sense of humor, and
warning pregnant women and kids about caffeine.
The same can’t be said of the television
anchors who use their interviews with him to fill
the end of the broadcast hour, usually with questions
based on a sense of morality felt principally
by straw men.
If there’s going to be moral outrage here, it
should be directed toward those who further
Kirby’s plans by taking his bad taste and serving
it up as a juicy story.
Only a tiny number of retailers even carry
the stuff right now; once the din quiets, it is
unlikely Cocaine will do much more than join
a group of similarly-named energy drinks that
have unsuccessfully used bad taste in marketing
to compensate for bad-tasting product. Whether
it succeeds or fails, it’ll likely do so based on its
ability to compete with other drinks.
Unless, that is, our colleagues in the media
– and the politicians they cover – continue to
feed their addiction to outrage.
Meanwhile, we’re addicted to all kinds of
drinks this month: gourmet sodas, unorthodox
wine containers and sports drinks among them.
Read on and enjoy.