New ads to portray ‘The Coke Side of Life’

The Coca-Cola Co., the world’s largest beverage maker, hopes to make its products more important to people and relevant in their lives with its latest advertising campaign.

The campaign, dubbed “The Coke Side of Life,” is aimed at increasing sales of its core carbonated soft drink brands in key markets. The Atlanta-based company gave a sneak peak at the campaign Thursday.

The marketing campaign, which will launch in other markets over the next several months, comes as industrywide sales volume of carbonated soft drinks fell last year in the United States for the first time since 1985. According to the publication Beverage Digest, volume slipped 0.2 percent. Excluding energy drinks, it fell 0.7 percent.

•Antitrust regulators are reviewing the McClatchy Co.’s proposed $4.5 billion takeover of Knight Ridder Inc., including its plan to sell 12 newspapers it is acquiring.

While the decision to investigate the proposed deal’s effect on competition and prices is fairly routine given its size, the government also apparently is interested in who might buy the Knight Ridder papers McClatchy plans to sell.

A journalism lecturer at San Jose State University said he received a call this week from a Justice Department lawyer inquiring about the effect on advertisers if MediaNews Group Inc. were to buy the San Francisco Bay area’s San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa Times from McClatchy. MediaNews already owns several papers in the area and is widely believed to be interested in those two.

•Nokia Corp. raised the global growth outlook for mobile devices Thursday as the world’s largest cell phone maker anticipated huge demand from emerging markets in Asia and Africa.

Nokia raised its estimate for worldwide sales this year to 915 million, or 15 percent over 2005.

•Google Inc. started displaying ads Thursday with its local maps service as the online search leader tries to find more ways to make money from the free services it has been introducing.

The ads, which will feature a small image and two lines of texts, will appear only if a search request mentions a product, service or specific business name, said Dominic Preuss, a company product manager for local advertising.

Google doesn’t plan to display the ads when a user is looking up an address or searching for driving directions, Preuss said.