H2NO
campaign by Coca-Cola
H2NO was an upselling campaign by The Coca-Cola Company to dissuade consumers from ordering tap water drinks at restaurants, and to instead order more profitable soft drinks, non-carbonated beverages, or bottled water. The campaign's title, H2NO, reflects the program's purpose, which is to have customers say No to H2O, the chemical formula for water. The program taught waiters how to use "suggestive selling techniques" to offer a variety of alternative beverages when diners asked for water.
In July 2001, a link to a story about the program's success at Olive Garden was posted to Cockeyed.com. The link was reposted around the internet, until the story was taken down by Coca-Cola on August 2, 2001, for fears it might be misinterpreted. On August 20, 2001, the story was covered by The New York Times, and subsequently by a number of news providers.
The campaign ran only in the United States.
Discovery and Coca-Cola response
The H2NO campaign had been conducted through an Internet memo to distributors and restaurants. In July 2001, Rob Cockerham, a graphic designer in Sacramento, came across the Olive Garden success story following an online search, and posted a link to the story on his website, Cockeyed.com. In an interview with The New York Times, Cockerham noted how "I had to assure more than one person that this was not a prank, and that it was a real article from Coca-Cola."
On August 2, 2001, about a week after the success story link was posted to Cockeyed.com, the Coca-Cola portal was closed.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “H2NO” as campaign by Coca-Cola. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as campaign by Coca-Cola. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5628820. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “H2NO” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.