On occasion, we have seen companies offering specialized options for fans of their products. M&M’s has options for selecting color choices and even personalized words and images on the candies, while Lays Potato Chips a few years ago invited snackers to create new flavors, with an option to even design the bag. Sometimes, these offers that allow the public to put the “custom” in the word customer can deliver problems.
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Usually, these promotions have built-in auto-approve software that limits selections so that offensive, vulgar, copyrighted, or other types of unacceptable options cannot be made. The Coca-Cola Company has a current promotion where drinkers can design a customized can with a select name or phrase printed on the label and have it delivered to their home or office. It has been discovered the company may have revealed its political leanings through this offer.
At the Media Resource Center Business division, Joseph Vazquez details how they found that making label selections based on the presidential candidates delivered starkly different results in the Coke system. He entered a number of options, including “President Harris” as well as “Harris Walz 2024,” and was met with no problems.
However, when he entered the options for her opponent – “President Trump” and “Trump Vance 2024” – the system delivered an auto-response denying the selections.
Looks like the name you requested is not approved. Names and phrases may not be approved if they are trademarked, political in nature, names of countries, celebrities, religious figures, as well as anything that could be considered offensive for other reasons.
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It is curious why this exclusion would be made, given Trump’s avowed affection for the diet beverage from the company. Making this dichotomy all the more interesting is that when Vasquez contacted the soft drink manufacturer about this systemic double standard on display, he was met with corporate silence. However, immediately following his outreach, he discovered that rather quickly the options previously approved for design were now being denied in the Coke website system.
I asked if they had retained any screencaps of the previously green-lighted design options and Joseph assured me that not only had they done so, but they went so far as to place an order for one approved design prior to the change. He tells us that while the “Harris Walz 2024” had been flagged, their order for “President Harris” garnered the “approved” notification. It remains to be seen if the evidence will actually be delivered.
While there is a chance that this could be chalked up to some kind of algorithm anomaly, it seems a stretch. Sure, possibly “Harris” is considered a common enough name that it would not have triggered the software filters, but how had “Walz” also been previously approved? We ran our own test just to see how strident the new parameters would be, and “RedState” is also deemed too political, even when the words were segregated on separate lines.
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However, one phrase managed to slip through the toughened censoring limitations.