Match of the Day: Ronaldo 1, Coke 0

It’s the most thrilling match of the Euros so far – Cristiano Ronaldo, the brilliant Portuguese footballer with a personal fortune of around €400 million versus Coca-Cola, the US soft drinks company with a stock market value of $238 billion.

The score to date is a 1-0 victory for Ronaldo who, by removing two Coca-Cola bottles during a press conference in Budapest on Monday ahead of his match and advising his fans to drink aqua (water in Portuguese), appears to have knocked $4 billion off Cola’s share price.

That’s quite a result, especially when you consider that Coca-Cola has a 32-year advertising partnership with Uefa and, on average, has spent about $4 billion a year for the last five years on advertising.

What makes the fitness fanatic’s strike against the soft drink brand a bigger kick in the teeth is that Ronaldo once took part in one of Coca-Cola’s advertising campaigns, a fact that has not escaped the attention of fans and critics alike. 

This begs the question whether there was an ulterior motive to Ronaldo’s gesture. Was he genuinely disgusted by the carbonated drinks on the table, and hopes to persuade the drinks giant into a healthier lifestyle? Or was it part of a cunning plan to show how much power he has over products – maybe he has contracts coming up for renewal?

Who knows, but like most big sporting celebrities, Ronaldo depends on the world’s biggest brands – in his case Tag Heuer, Clear Haircare, Nike and Herbalife – for the millions he earns each year from sporting their logos. He should tread carefully. 

For its part, Coca-Cola played a cool game, with a spokesman saying that everyone is entitled to drink what they like. Quite right too: Coca-Cola knows that the share price fall – equal to about 0.4 per cent – was a mere drop in the ocean and is unlikely to dent sales.

Yet the Ronaldo incident is a timely reminder of how so much power has shifted to celebrities in their relationships with corporate sponsors, encouraged by the echo chamber of social media bubbles.

At the same time, a minority of activists and campaigners are using the viral nature of social media to dramatically influence corporate behaviour, as witnessed by the decision by several companies to boycott GB News.

After only a couple of days of broadcasting, seven firms – out of a total of more than 70 corporates – have said they will either pause or quit advertising with Andrew Neil’s new Ofcom regulated channel ostensibly because it is “too right wing” and promotes the wrong values. (Other big advertisers such as Microsoft, Google, BurgerKing, Deliveroo and Toyota seem to be happy.)

What is weird is that Ikea, Nivea, Grolsch, Kopparberg and Octopus Energy will have bought their airtime on GB – which is being handled by Sky Media – weeks ago, and everyone knew that Neil’s ambition to create a new TV station was to open up debate to opinions from all sides of the political spectrum. 

Yet within 24 hours of the channel going live they had pulled out after being listed and targeted by the Stop Funding Hate lobbying group. It’s a UK-based two-man outfit, supported mainly by volunteers, but with a big aim, declaring on its website: “We’re making hate unprofitable by persuading advertisers to pull their support from publications that spread hate and division.”

That’s strong stuff. As far as one can tell after three days, saying that GB News is spreading hate is a ludicrous accusation and not borne out by the evidence. Some technical issues, maybe, and a few too many predictable talking heads but hardly hate. 

You may even disagree with some of the ideas being put forward but disagreement and varying points of view are surely central to any news or broadcast media. Anyone with any knowledge of Andrew Neil would know he lives and breathes challenging the status quo.

Why then are Ikea – which has just been fined for hiring private detectives to follow staff – and Nivea, in such a hurry to disown the station? Are their corporate bosses so scared by being on the Stop Funding Hate list and subject to a few Tweets claiming the station is full of anti-woke headbangers that they are prepared to forego reaching big TV audiences? Is appeasing a minority more important to corporates today than the commercial drive to sell more flat-packs or face cream to a wider audience?

It’s a bizarre moral decision, to say the least, and an equally odd economic decision too. Who better to ask what is turning the world of advertising upside down than industry doyens, Rory Sutherland, deputy chairman of Ogilvy and Jeremy Sinclair, one of the founders of the original Saatchi & Saatchi and M&C Saatchi?

Sutherland reckons we are seeing an element of unattractive performative pontificating on the part of corporates we want to be seen on the side of the angels. But behind the scenes, companies are doing what they have always done, pay as little tax and get away with what they can.  

As to the cult of social media more generally, he describes how we are falling prey to the Barbara Streisand effect – an example of psychological reactance – which is when people are motivated to spread information that they find out has been kept from them.

It’s named after Streisand after she tried to stop a Californian coastal group from taking pictures of her house during a project looking at coastal erosion. By drawing attention to the move, the singer alerted thousands of people to the fact that she lived there.

Sinclair is a little more judgemental, asking why company bosses are not braver in standing up to the more sensitive souls – often within their own companies – who see everything these days through a binary lens.  

What is ironic, he says, is that corporate advertising used to be a way of bypassing the media to send a message directly from the client to the consumer using humour and charm to persuade their audiences. 

Now, it is the corporates that are determined to speak to who they think their audience is, but also anticipate what the audiences think too. 

But Sinclair warns them that this is a foolish move; popular brands are popular because they have wide appeal and he hopes that it is a passing phase.  

Yet both Sutherland and Sinclair defend the right of companies to boycott certain media outlets as fundamental to a free market, and indeed to free speech. If Ikea or any other company decides to boycott GB News, that’s fine, although they should be transparent about the reasons for doing so. And if consumers want to boycott Ikea or Grolsch because they think they are being daft about the boycott, that’s fine too.