News

Share a Coke 'Mambo No. 5'

A viral picture appeared to show a cute coincidence with 'Share a Coke' campaign bottles.

Published Aug. 8, 2014

In the summer of 2014, Coke's "Share A Coke" campaign was the subject of a much social media buzz, and one image (of the many circulating inspired by the campaign) appeared to capture an adorable coincidence: several of the special edition Cokes, lined up in order of the names listed in Lou Bega's 1999 summer hit "Mambo No. 5."

The image of the Share A Coke bottles looked to have been snapped by a supermarket shopper, resulting in the funny picture making its way to the social web via the common social aggregator, Reddit.

In a thread titled simply "Mambo #5," a user shared a picture of a row of Coke bottles bearing all the names listed in the song. The referenced song verse was:

A little bit of Monica in my life,
A little bit of Erica by my side,
A little bit of Rita's what I need,
A little bit of Tina's what I see,
A little bit of Sandra in the sun,
A little bit of Mary all night long,
A little bit of Jessica here I am
A little bit of you makes me your man.

 

As it happened, the image of Share A Coke bottles either lining up or being arranged in a pop-culture call-out fashion was immediately deemed to be photoshopped by many users for the standard "image quality" reasons. Another common refrain among Reddit commenters suggested that the image was a

potential viral marketing ploy — not unheard of on popular social sites, but not necessarily the case here.

While Reddit quickly dismissed the image as most certainly a bit of humorous and likely benign image manipulation, the post quickly made its way to many news sites.

The official Share A Coke promotion page features a search function allowing consumers to determine which names are part of the retail promotion. Mary, Erica, and Monica were indeed female names included in the promotion in the summer of 2014, but Sandra, Jessica, Rita, and Tina were not:

As of summer 2015, however, all of these names were part of the official U.S. "Share A Coke" campaign.

David Mikkelson founded the site now known as snopes.com back in 1994.

Article Tags