The Fake Poster

Some smart person made a fake Coca-Cola billboard in Berlin—perfectly rendered, Christmas aesthetic, one added line: Say no to the AfD. It was December and it was part of the AfD Advent Calendar, which was a campaign of daily actions against racism and the far-right, twenty-four of them, one for each day.

Corporations want it both ways. All the marketing about diversity and inclusion, but no actual positions when things get messy. So activists filled the gap with a fake. The genius part is how little the poster needed: Coca-Cola had already done the emotional Christmas work. Someone just borrowed that template and added one sentence.

It made its point just by existing—here’s what it would look like if they actually cared. Here’s how easy it would be.

Coca-Cola’s response was something like: not every fake has to be false. Which I respected. It’s not the same as taking a position, but it’s acknowledgment. It’s a company saying yes to something instead of running legal through it first.

The billboard stayed fake. The campaign ran its course. But for a month that year, the gap between what corporations claim to stand for and what they’re willing to do got filled with clever activism and borrowed logos. You can do a lot in that space between performance and conviction.