There’s no other way to describe it – Coca Cola (or which ever piss poor promotions company they’ve hired this week) couldn’t give a monkey’s left ball about their young customers. The evidence is clear.

Our 10 year old daughter was at the local Southland Shopping Centre a couple of weeks ago – 25 January. I wasn’t with her, but Coca Cola had some promotion going on. It involved having your photo taken – ‘Summer Huggin’. She was handed a card with the date etc, and told to check the web site to see her photos. Here’s the card:

Each day we checked the web site, but nothing. There were photos from Southland on 23 Jan, but nothing for the 25th.

So on 29 Jan I tracked down the contact form on the web site and sent off a note saying it was pretty disappointing for a young child to be told her photo would be online, and then to find this was not true.

Next day back came a clearly ‘canned’ answer:

“Dear David,

Thank you for your recent contact regarding our Summer Huggin promotion.

Coca-Cola Amatil is committed to producing enjoyable promotions and we appreciate your interest our current campaign.

We are currently in the process of uploading Hug Photos to our Summer Huggin website, however due to the large amount of images there has been a delay in this process.

We thank you for your patience in this matter and for taking the time to contact us.

Regards,
The Coke Webmaster

Please do not reply to this email. For further enquiries visit http://www.coca-cola.com.au/emailus.asp or call us on 1800 025 123”

We continued to check the web site. As of today, 4 Feb, still nothing. But they HAVE managed to find time to upload photos from another shopping centre on 31 Jan.

How hard is this? My 10 year old manages her own web sites, shoots and upload dozens of photos, and writes in her blog. But one of the largest companies in the world can’t get its shit together and stick a few dozen photos on their (crap) web site.

And my daughter is STILL asking about when the photos will appear. Looks to me like they’ve lost the photos but don’t have the balls to confess. If they have the photos and still can’t find 5 minutes to upload them, then shame. What a rip off.