The well-known multinational Coca-Cola has confirmed that it has suspended an advertising collaboration with the entrepreneur and influencer Chiara Ferragni, who in recent weeks has been at the center of a scandal related to an advertising campaign for a line of Pandoros by the confectionery company Balocco.
The news related to Coca-Cola was expected by Repubblica on Friday morning and then confirmed by the company. Last December, Coca-Cola hired Ferragni to shoot a commercial that would have appeared at the end of January, just before the start of the Sanremo festival, scheduled for February 6th. After the scandal and the resulting damage to its image, the company decided not to broadcast the commercial filmed with the influencer: “We worked with Chiara in Italy in 2023, including for some filming last December.” “At the moment we are not planning to include this content use,” Coca-Cola told Repubblica.
At the end of December, Safilo, a Veneto-based eyewear company, also announced that it had ended its collaboration with Ferragni, which began in 2022, and plans to design, produce and distribute a line of eyewear under the “Chiara Ferragni” brand. However, Safilo did not explicitly confirm a connection between the interruption of the contract and the Balocco-Pandori affair.
– Also read: How do you get out of a mess that Chiara Ferragni got into?
On December 15 last year, two Ferragni companies, together with Balocco, were fined 1.4 million euros by the Antitrust Authority, that is, the Competition and Market Authority, according to which, in 2022, the advertising campaign for a Pandori line was carried out in a misleading way in the campaign It was believed that every Pandoro purchased contributed to a charitable donation to the Regina Margherita Hospital in Turin, but in reality the amount of the donation was already fixed, regardless of sales.