I suppose I'm unusual in that my own first-hand experience with the short-lived clear cola craze of the early 1990s was rooted exclusively in Tab Clear, ie: the contender that generated zero nostalgia and, as per later revelations, was never built with longevity in mind. Its principal rival, Crystal Pepsi, might have suffered a swift demise by '94 but has clung to a degree of relevance as a fuzzy cultural memory from a bygone era - enough so to have eventually become the subject of several internet petitions, which in turn led to a series of limited revivals in recent years. Tab Clear, meanwhile, remains stranded in Stagnation Ville, a mere footnote in the Crystal's more illustrious (by comparison) career, albeit one that certainly left its mark. Nowadays, it's public knowledge (thanks to the divulgings of ex-Coca-Cola marketing officer Sergio Zyman) that Coca-Cola formulated Tab Clear not with the intention of competing with Pepsi's hot new product, but of nipping it in the bud - the idea was that you would see this uninspiring product on the shelves beside Crystal Pepsi, assume they were all much of a muchness and bypass them altogether. That's why they used the lesser Tab brand, and not Coca-Cola, so as to not risk muddying their flagship beverage with another high-profile fiasco, following on from the then still relatively recent business with New Coke. What made the Tab (or TaB, if you prefer) juxtaposition particularly lethal to Crystal Pepsi was that Tab was a sugarless drink whose particular market niche had already suffered a severe diminishing with the introduction of Diet Coke in 1982. Pepsi's strategy revolved around promoting a sense of wellness in a way that circumvented the usual ignominy of being a diet cola - its great boast, from a nutritional standpoint, is that it was caffeine free (the idea behind the clear cola fad being that consumers were intended to associate clarity with purity, regardless of how much merit there was in that particular equation) - whereas Tab Clear was only too eager to hype up all of the attributes that made a cola appear strictly for the calorie-conscious, with "Sugar Free" and "Calorie Free" being right there in big bold lettering upon the side of the can. Coca-Cola set out to sabotage Pepsi's clear revolution by wilfully producing a soft drink to look as uncharismatically dorky as possible, and apparently it worked like a charm. Not that dumb and not that smart, say you?
And there's an extent to which all of that leaves me with quite a bitter taste in my mouth, because as a child I was positively enthralled by the novelty of Tab Clear, a product whose own creators, unbeknownst to me, regarded as ingeniously lousy, and were busy basking in their own duplicitous cleverness right while I was pestering my parents to buy me a bottle. Crystal Pepsi had slipped right under my radar, but Tab Clear felt like big news - a soft drink that tasted (somewhat) like Coca-Cola, but was incongruously transparent. At the same time, there was something about the beverage that struck me as somehow profoundly unnatural. Its very existence seemed like a freaky distortion of the laws of reality. It's so-called purity - the fact that we were being called to regard sugarless and colourless as synonymous - struck me as somewhat hard to swallow. Tab Clear was not a product I especially trusted, and yet my morbid curiosity compelled me to swig the dubious substance into my digestive tract anyway. My fascination was intense, but short-lived, and I'm not convinced I even noticed when the product was quietly withdrawn from the market soon after. But for a moment there, it really had me.
With hindsight, it's not exactly a mystery as to why Tab Clear should have caught my eye while Crystal Pepsi didn't - the former's ad campaign was significantly stranger. And for a product supposedly earmarked as a sacrificial lamb from its conception, I was certainly bombarded with ads for Tab Clear incessantly enough throughout the spring of '93 - in particular, the one claiming that Bigfoot, as glimpsed in the infamous and much-debated Patterson-Gimlin footage, was really German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II, on the run from the fall-out of World War I and leading a secret life as a tourist attraction in the Oregon wilderness (not actually where the Patterson-Gimlin footage was filmed, but perhaps that's unimportant), and that Tab Clear was supposedly at the centre of life's sticky web of perpetually unravelling chaos. It seems a world apart from the Crystal Pepsi tactic, which was to roll out as much cheerful imagery and trite reassurances ("Right now only wildlife needs preservatives") the average eyeball could take to the sounds of Van Halen's "Right Now" (the premise of the ad, with its use of evocative subtitles, was modelled upon the song's original music video). Pepsi's campaign was built on an overflow of colour (somewhat ironically, given the product's most prominent attribute) and on the exaltation of a glorious present where anything was possible, while Tab Clear looked back to the unsightly mess that is human history, played with a tongue-in-cheek fondness for urban legends and conspiracy theories, and steeped in a sense of flippant paranoia. Both of them made some parallel between the transparency of their product and a dawning age of heightened enlightenment, but the Tab campaign was much more openly at ease with the fact that what it was spouting was absolute drivel. Tab, for one, embraced the notion (which had seemed so obvious to the younger me) that there was something inherently warped and off-kilter about a clear cola - the "Chain of Mystery/Sinister Connections" campaign was built around that intrinsic sense of wrongness, effectively positing the product as the unfathomable cosmic energy fuelling a parallel universe that, among other things, seemed to follow a confoundingly different temporal sequence to our own (there, the fall of the Berlin Wall apparently occurred before the disappearance of Flight 19). Secondly, there is something tauntingly ironic in the very idea that Coca-Cola would use a campaign poking fun at conspiracy theories to market a product they had conceived with the dirty ulterior motive of failing and dragging a rival initiative down with it. Were they possibly daring us to see through their baffling razzmatazz and comprehend exactly what they were up to?
On that note, we might assume that the campaign, in line with everything else we know surrounding Coca-Cola's conception of Tab Clear, was not expected to win the public over to to the merits of the beverage - and I have seen criticism of "Chain of Mystery" centred on how the product it's supposedly hawking gets sidelined for so much of the ad that the viewer never has a chance to get a firm grasp on what Tab Clear is and what it actually has to do with any of this, beyond the most arbitrary of connections. Yet, while I didn't exactly become a Tab Clear loyalist in the long-term (or as long a term as the drink's brief shelf-life would have allowed), I can credit the campaign in that I never forgot it, or just how confused it made me feel as a child. My callow brain could barely comprehend anything going on in those purported chains of mystery - I had a limited understanding of the bulk of the historical occurrences and conspiracy theories to which they alluded, and I was still too young and inexperienced to have a handle on just how crazy the adult world could be about that sort of thing. To me, it was just a lot of weird stuff that happened, and from a thematic standpoint it made a vague amount of sense, because Tab Clear the product was also weird. A clear cola? Now that's just twisted.
I'm aware of at least three TV ads in the "Chain of Mystery/Sinister Connections" series. There's the aforementioned one speculating on a perceived connection between Kaiser Wilhelm II's reckless foreign policy, UFO sightings in Idaho and alleged Bigfoot encounters (the Kaiser's fortunes were caused by a reaction to drinking Tab Clear, which set everything else in motion). Another posits that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the alligators reputed to roam New York City's sewers were revealed to be Soviet submarines, which were consequently abandoned and - somehow or other- caused a squadron to go missing over the Bermuda Triangle (though they later showed up alive and AWOL in a bar in Vegas). Naturally, Tab Clear had a hand in all of this too. Finally, there was an ad linking the inexplicable popularity of Australian media star Bert Newton (turns out, Tab Clear was the secret of his immense sex appeal) to a cosmonaut disappearance and the creation of Kata Tjuṯa - you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'll hazard a guess that that last one was made exclusively for Australian television, as I doubt the late Bert Newton was prominent enough elsewhere for the joke to have played with international viewers. There was also a radio ad with a droid at Stonehenge monologuing on the beverage as one of the great paradoxes of human existence (and how interesting to note that mobile phones were regarded as frivolous technology back in 1993).
The paradox, as depicted in the campaign, was that Tab Clear represented such a disturbing deviation on our preconceived notions of what a cola should be while still retaining that same robust and familiar cola flavour. Turns out, we were not actually expected to swallow that, no more than we were expected to seriously ponder if Bigfoot might really be an exiled German emperor caked in moss. Still, there is something strangely poetic about the campaign's ideation of an alternate universe in which the off-centre attributes of the transparent cola made it the driving force behind all of the important events and legends of the century past, while in this universe, it wasn't meant to be. Tab Clear was an abhorrent interloper that was rapidly ejected from our own timeline, but not without having altered the trajectory for cola consumption in the years ahead. The clear revolution was halted outside the gate, and while we'll never know for certain that Crystal Pepsi wouldn't eventually just have fizzled out at its own pace, Tab Clear ensured that it never got the chance to gain a stronghold in the market. But I suppose with Crystal Pepsi's current status as a beneficiary of nostalgia, it remains to be seen if Coca-Cola really had the last laugh. It sure did have the tangier campaign, though.
Incidentally, I distinctly remember finding the taste of Tab Clear to be close enough of that to regular cola to have me satisfied in 1993, but I was still a young kid and I'll concede that my palate was probably a lot less sophisticated back then. Although that does account for why I would end up losing interest in the product anyway - if it all went down the same to me, there probably wasn't much to keep me requesting Tab Clear once the novelty had worn off.
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