Corporate sponsorship is everywhere so why see red over Coca-Cola?

The London Eye is looking rather bloodshot these days. Particularly at night. It’s developed a livid-red shade and seems badly in need of having a few thousand gallons of Optrex spat into it by a passing superhero. I like it. It’s fitting that, amid such national doubt and self-loathing, one of the capital’s most famous landmarks should show signs of inflammation. “Ouch – nasty!” feels like an appropriate response to the London skyline in 2015.

But many people disapprove of the rosy new look. That’s because it hasn’t been adopted to symbolise blood, war, pain or emergency, but something altogether more sinister: sugar – the seductive commodity that millions were enslaved to produce, in the shadow of whose destructive force opium and cocaine stand meekly by. The Eye is now illuminated every dusk in Coca-Cola scarlet.

The attraction, officially renamed the Coca-Cola London Eye, closed a deal with the pop giant in September in the wake of EDF Energy’s sponsorship term ending. It means Coca-Cola branding is now all over the cafes and ticket office, it’s on the staff and in the pods, which health campaigners hate.

Malcolm Clark of the Children’s Food Campaign handed out 500 toothbrushes at the Eye last weekend. This apparently symbolised the 500 five- to nine-year-olds who are hospitalised because of tooth decay every week. This nice round number (or naughty but nice round number) came from a statistic, reported last July, that in England almost 26,000 children of that age group had gone to hospital for tooth extractions over a 12-month period in 2013-2014. (I’m guessing the tooth year, like the tax year, goes from April to April.) As symbols for suffering go, these toothbrushes aren’t quite up there with the Make Poverty History finger-clicks, but that still sounds like lots of kids losing teeth in non-fairy-related circumstances.

Clark’s disdain was shared by many: “What next? Buckingham Palace sponsored by Coca-Cola?” spat Dr John Middleton, health policy vice-president at the Faculty of Public Health. And Professor Simon Capewell of Liverpool University said: “People no longer tolerate sponsorship by tobacco companies. Why on earth should we tolerate sponsorship by a sugary drinks company?” I suspect that was more of an argument-ending zinger in his head.

I hate corporate sponsorship. It’s ugly and tawdry. Adverts are no longer the preserve of hoardings, commercial breaks and clearly demarcated bits of newspapers and magazines. Through “sponsorships” and “partnerships”, what was once a resilient but containable bacterium has turned viral and is now inside our very cells. Corporations can buy their way into the titles we give to places, events and attractions – grandstands, stadiums, tournaments – and so their brand names invade our sentences. Their words get into our mouths followed inevitably, in the case of firms such as Coca-Cola, by their merchandise.

These new corporate relationships reject the honest parasitism of advertising and loathsomely adopt the rhetoric of symbiosis. This is what Merlin Entertainment, which owns the London Eye, said about its huge Coke deal: “Our big value has always been to create happy moments for our customers. That’s also been Coke’s values for the last 127 years. Coca-Cola will bring fun activities to the London Eye, which is something we’re looking forward to and delighted about.”

I mean, please! What do they take us for? And what “fun activities” is Coca-Cola going to bring to this Ferris wheel? I would’ve thought its range of entertainments was pretty much limited to rides in pods on a big wheel. What can the guys from Coke add to that, other than free Coke? Will they make it go faster? Or change direction halfway through a spin? Will people who’ve guzzled a litre of cola get the chance to piss out of the pods at the top?

Dr Middleton says: “There needs to be a much bigger public debate about control of advertising before commercial corporate interests infiltrate every aspect of the public landscape.” I disagree. You only have to look at the Olympics, the Responsibility Deal and Anthea Turner’s wedding to realise that corporate interests already have infiltrated every aspect of the public landscape. So we’ve missed our chance for that debate. Had it happened, I think most people would have said that these deals, this labelling, this language of mutual corporate respect concealing a frothing need to foist products on the credulous, is a lamentable aspect of modern life.

But then others would adopt a grownup tone of voice and explain how corporate money can be a great enabler – can, in this case, make the London Eye more affordable for millions of people. They wouldn’t mention that Coca-Cola can only do this because those same millions have already given it billions in exchange for dissolved sugar. “This,” they would tell us, “is how the world works,” and, on recent form, we’re likely to have glumly accepted it. Perhaps it’s just as well we skipped the whole debate after all.

If we’re going to allow corporate sponsorship – and that shows no sign of changing, or even being susceptible to change – it seems unfair to single out a fizzy drink company’s branding of a rotating viewing platform as particularly egregious. It might be a family attraction but it’s not aimed specifically at children. And if we’re resigning ourselves to a business environment in which firms rely on these deals to remain competitive, can we really expect the London Eye to find a completely unimpeachable sponsor – some Fairtrade brand of organic tea perhaps, which doesn’t then turn out to be 40% owned by Nestlé – purely on the basis that children are among its customers? And I don’t see that Coca-Cola is worse than EDF Energy or British Airways, the Eye’s previous sponsors, who may not exacerbate tooth decay but, by burning fossil fuels, are jeopardising the entire planet on which we all aspire to healthily chew.

Like Malcolm Clark, Simon Capewell and John Middleton, I reckon we shouldn’t drink so much Coke. But it’s not poisonous – it can be “enjoyed responsibly” even if Coca-Cola’s share price would tumble if that behaviour became widespread. With shameless corporate branding all around us, I don’t think much would be achieved by knocking Coke’s name off the Eye, other than threatening the solvency of the ride.

Ultimately, these branding deals only happen because firms think they make us better disposed to, and more conscious of, their products and that, consequently, we’ll buy more of them. So it’s only by openly disdaining these “partnerships” for what they are – corporations invading our attention using money we’ve provided – that we’ll ever put a stop to them.