Coca-Cola makes art that is pleasing to the eye and valuable in its own right. For example, I own a classic Coke machine and think it's quite a beauty. This is commonplace with Coca-Cola equipment and marketing stuff. And who doesn't love the little Santa bottles they make for the holidays?

No, it is still Ad. No ads are appeasing, because they are, by their nature, distractions and freeloaders, no matter how appealing their disguise might be. I am more than happy to skip all coca-cola ads that shown before movies, even they look OK, but I don't need them.

But after all, those ads leave an impression on me, that coca-cola is still there, in a red glassy bottle/can, and people seem happy drinking it. That is the reason I might choose it as my go-to soft drinks other than some unknown small brands. So that is advertising works, laziness.

It's not laziness, it's risk-aversion. They're different. I will put in significantly more effort to go to McDonald's instead of some no-name fast food joint because I know for sure what the price will be and what the food will taste like.

Speaking of McDonald's, I really learned to appreciate them and if anyone starts whining to me again about "americanization of everything" I'll tell them to go spend a month in southern China. As a westerner, unless you're particularly fond of sweet food and sea food, you'll likely quickly appreciate that there is always a McDonald's, KFC and Starbucks nearby. Being able to buy safe food that you know you'll like is godsend when trying to ease into another culture's cousine.

McDonalds to me represents everything that's wrong with the western world, everything from its diabetes inducing substances that try hard to mimic actual food and designed to be eaten in a car, to its employment practices. And if you're in China, or in another place where you don't like the food, assuming that you've got access to a kitchen, you can of course cook. Surely you can find chicken, eggs, milk, rice, onions, garlic, beans, peas, potatoes, lettuce, tomatoes or pasta at the supermarket and there's plenty of dishes that you can cook in under one hour and with low effort from those.

There's plenty of data-driven academic research to back you up. It's not very interesting to read, but the stuff I've gone through confirms that brand advertising does work (although maybe not in the way you think it does. Some research, for instance, shows brand advertising not increasing the volume of sales, but allowing brands to justify higher prices, increasing their revenue.)

Not sure what research you're talking about, but it's all about the paradox of choice. People hate making choices, so when in a supermarket or at a restaurant, confronted with the choice on "getting something to drink" for example, you often end up going for the familiar and seeing a brand on TV counts as familiar. This is also why the taste of Coca-Cola does not change or why Coca-Cola continuously does brand advertising, even though most people are already familiar with it - the brand advertising for Coca-Cola is not targeting the 30 or the 40 year olds, but rather the preadolescents and the adolescents that don't have a sense of familiarity yet.

This research: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1059217

"...advertising was positively linked to brand prices in manufactured food products. Prices of weakly advertised manufacturer brands, private labels and generic products were substantially lower than the prices of leading brands, especially highly advertised leading brands. Since the products selected for analysis were relatively homogenous, real quality and cost differences do not appear to account for the price differences across brands."

This may or may not be a result of the paradox of choice. That would be an interesting paper: "brand advertising increases prices when there are fewer than five choices of brands" would be a testable hypothesis, but I haven't been able to find that paper.