The Cyranos McCann launched a new campaign for Coca-Cola entitled “Let’s take an extra second” which aims to raise awareness of commonly held prejudices and encourage people to take an extra second to overcome them.
At the center of the campaign is the “Experiment” in which the agency showed participants pictures of different individuals and then asked them what they thought about them. They found that in just a few seconds, the participants had built up an idea about the person based on personal prejudice. But the participants had a surprise in store. After shattering their prejudices with a few extra images, the agency introduced participants to the individuals they were judging, who were behind the screen the whole time. Other ads in the campaign take a similar approach, shattering prejudiced notions about certain types of individuals in “Grandma” and “Blonde,” while also tackling “Bullying.”
“Today, all the world’s leaders agree on one thing, inequality is the biggest problem humanity is facing, and the main driver of inequality are prejudices,” said Leandro Raposo, creative president of The Cyranos McCann. “Coca-Cola is probably the brand that talks the most about equality in its communication, and also as product is one of the most democratic in the market. That’s why is only natural for us to be developing this campaign where we speak about prejudices, but not by stigmatizing ourselves as a society, or being politically correct, but by portraying real cases in an almost interactive way; prejudice in first person. To a greater or a smaller degree, we are all biased, what is serious about that is to live without questioning it or going against it. This campaign asks us to take one more second to get rid of generalization as a way of looking at the other.”