A WHOLE LOT OF FUN, PRIZES TO BE WON [253]

Coke Zone was the name of a loyalty points scheme operated by Coca-Cola from 2008 to 2013 across its range of soft drinks. By collecting codes printed on bottles, boxes and can ring pulls, the points you accumulate could buy money-off vouchers to use in stores, magazine subscriptions, cinema tickets and, if you were lucky, expensive electrical items like games consoles and cameras.

I have great memories of Coke Zone. Diet Coke is still my favourite drink, and because I rarely ever drink anything alcoholic, Diet Coke is often all I ever drink, apart from water. Introducing a loyalty scheme to a product for which I was already a loyal customer was very welcome indeed.

To be honest, I practically fleeced Coca-Cola when they ran Coke Zone. I diligently collected the codes to enter on their website to collect the points, and friends and work colleagues that knew I was collecting the codes gave me their bottles and cans to throw away, after I wrote the codes down. You were only allowed to collect fifty points per week, and while a 330ml can gave you one point, a 500ml bottle gave you two, and a multipack scored five points, I often reached their weekly limit due to the codes I was given.

In return, I received many things: 100 points could be exchanged for £5 vouchers to use at HMV to buy CDs and DVDs – before 2011, when HMV also owned the bookshop chain Waterstones, I could redeem them for books as well. I received quite a few tickets to watch films at my local cinema, also at 100 points each. I had a year’s free subscription to the film magazine “Empire.” I also had a money-off voucher for a clothes shop, which I remembered using on a pair of shorts.

The high point was when I actually caught a big-ticket item on the Coke Zone website, which often disappeared as quickly as they appeared: on a day off from work, having collected enough points to participate, I spent 600 points to buy a Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-T90 camera, which cost about £250 in 2009 – it was either one of them, or an Xbox 360 console. I still own and use this camera.

When Coca-Cola started to wind down Coke Zone in 2013, the offers had become less enticing – increased participation from people in the points scheme had caused inflation, with vouchers costing 100 points having increased to 150, then 200 points, while larger items, previously costing over a thousand points, were replaced with prize draws, spending fewer points to enter. Coca-Cola provided a final round of larger products to burn up the piles of points that some, like me, had amassed – I bought a nineteen-inch Sony Bravia television which, like the camera four years earlier, would have costed around £250, but costed 1,500 points. Once Coke Zone finally closed, I had received prizes and vouchers worth a total of over £650.

I have never been that lucky since, although I rarely enter any competitions. However, I have benefitted from other points reward schemes: HMV started their own, Pure HMV, whose money-off vouchers came in good use when I realised I needed David Bowie’s complete discography after he died. Like Tesco Clubcard and the Boots Advantage card, my loyalty to buying products from them that I could have bought elsewhere is being rewarded, rather than buying one brand instead of another – I guess the 1980s “cola wars” between Coke and Pepsi never really ended. Meanwhile, my bank introduced a current account in 2014 that offered its own yearly choice of rewards, one of which was six free cinema tickets per year. I have paid to watch a film in a cinema only a few times in the last ten years, and one of those times was for “Cats.”

My Coke Zone online login apparently still works, but Coca-Cola’s website now only offers product news and the occasional competition, which is perhaps all it should ever have done. Coca-Cola is a brand that does not need to advertise as much as other products, such is its place in popular culture – I wish I could find a copy of the poster I once saw that shows a Coke bottle with the slogan, “And what would you like to eat?” They only need to advertise to remind people they are there, which is why you see Coca-Cola ads most often at Christmas, Easter and during the summer.

Fortunately for Coca-Cola, I would have continued drinking Diet Coke regardless of whether Coke Zone existed, but I took advantage of it while it was there. My continual loyalty to them has since been measured in pounds Sterling, rather than points.

FLASH, WHAT A PICTURE, WHAT A PHOTOGRAPH [252]

The first camera I remember using was a Kodak Disc 4000. Like most point-and-shoot cameras of the 1980s, there was little to go wrong: there was a single fixed-focus lens and an automatic flash, so all I needed to do, apart from removing the lens cover, was point and shoot.

It was our family’s camera, so I obviously will not be sharing any example pictures, but according to what I have read since, the picture quality achieved by the camera and film is supposed to be worse than I remembered.

Introduced in 1982, but not lasting much beyond the end of the decade, Disc film was Kodak’s latest attempt to package their film in a simple and fool-proof cassette, avoiding the hassle of unspooling film and winding it into your camera yourself, risking damage to the film and unwanted exposure to light if not done properly. Kodak had previously introduced the “126” and “110” film formats for their Instamatic camera ranges, encasing the usual supply and take-up film spools in a cartridge that the user could replace without ever touching the film, but replicating how the film and spools normally inside the camera made the cartridges necessarily bulky.

Disc film was completely different – encased in a flat cassette was a disc of stiff film, arranged in a circle of fifteen 10 x 8.5 mm image frames, not unlike a View-Finder toy, but not compatible with one. Simply open the back of the camera, place in the cassette, and start shooting.

The elimination of spools meant film could not be distorted or damaged by the film either being rolled up before or after taking the picture, or held down when the picture is taken. The tiny image size allows for a very short focal length of 12.5mm, and the lack of spools reduced the overall thickness of the camera: the Kodak Disc 4000 was only 3.2cm thick, which I didn’t see again until digital cameras became more popular.

Like the earlier formats, improvements in film production allowed for use of the same film in a wider range of conditions, and greater picture quality from smaller images taken - 126 film took image sizes of 26 x 26mm, and 100 film took 17 x 13mm images. However, because Disc cameras were not envisaged for anyone other than consumers wanting a simple camera, you could only buy standard Kodacolor film, so no experiments with Kodachrome, Ektachrome or black-and-white were possible.

Because the image size of Disc film was very small, the perceived lesser quality of pictures taken with a Disc camera appears to be a numbers game. They were considered of adequate quality when they were developed and printed onto 6 x 4 inch paper, but that was at a time when printing pictures was the only way most people saw their pictures, and 6 x 4 inches is often bigger than the screens on the smartphones where most pictures now taken often remain, regardless of how many megapixels were involved. However, the aspherical lenses used in both the cameras and the printing equipment, designed to make the most of the small image size, was an extra expense for developers that was often not spent, meaning many prints did not capture the quality of the original negative.

I guess our family was lucky with our prints, although the fact that Boots, the chemists that once had a network of film development centres in store, also sold Disc cameras under their own brand, probably meant they developed their prints properly. We later moved to using a regular 35mm film camera, either when cameras that automated the loading of standard film rolls became more common, or when the sealed lithium batteries inside the Disc camera ran down – like most devices now, we would have had to send it to a dealer or the manufacturer to replace them.

As if to prove that the 10 x 8.5mm Disc image does not mean you are looking at the film grain as much as the picture, there is the fact that pretty much everyone has seen motion pictures taken from an image size of just 10.26 x 7.49mm. Any time British television made a show on film, or ever filmed outside, whether it was “Doctor Who,” “Pride and Prejudice” or “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” used 16mm film – the widescreen Super 16 format, used even today on HD-quality productions, is only 2.26mm wider. All you need to do is do your homework, use the right lenses at all times, and have the BBC insist on Kodak making progressively better film.