Coca-Cola has seized a lot of screen time in both the final season of Mad Men (ending its run tonight!) and in the debut season of HAPPYish; I’ve been, if not perplexed, perturbed by its prevalence. As if Coca-Cola does not have its hands wringing our necks at every turn with clever-as-fuck ad campaigns, product placement and brand ubiquity that is so deeply ingrained in our lives that we don’t even notice it and think it’s totally normal.

I had forgotten when I wrote about Coca-Cola woven into two of Sunday night’s TV offers that I recently was “upgraded” to a branded hotel room in Oslo – I don’t know if the room had a name, but I will call it the “Coca-Cola Life room”. It featured a small living room and a bedroom and a whole lot of Coca-Cola Life pictures and banners as well as a fridge filled with this bizarre Coca-Cola Life beverage – all gratis.

Coca-Cola is not life – hotel room Oslo

For those unfamiliar, Coca-Cola Life (this website is the ugliest thing I have ever seen Coke make) is Coke’s sort of new low-calorie drink. It has some actual sugar but is mostly sweetened with Stevia. I don’t think it’s been launched in the US yet but it’s not something I would go out looking for no matter where I am. I had noticed it in the stores in Sweden and wondered whether it was some kind of ill-advised cola-flavored energy drink. And when I ended up in a Coca-Cola Life branded room, I had more than enough time to read the label and taste the results. (Nothing to report – tastes like any other cola drink and did not really seem like a “diet” version of most soda.)

But you know what? Coca-Cola is not life. Duh. There’s something mystifying, sad and offensive about Coca-Cola taking a word as simple as “life” and co-opting it to sell tooth rot in a bottle.

Best part of the hotel room by the way – a weird drawer/cupboard with the toy hind-end of a big cat as handle.

big cat ass drawer handle