Coconut Tree ran a chesty tagline on TV for months — regulators pulled the whole campaign

From October 2018 into February 2019, Hainan-based drink maker Coconut Tree ran a television campaign for its coconut-juice brand on regional news channels including Hainan, Sichuan and Yunnan. The ad leaned on its decades-old tagline, roughly 'from childhood to grown, I've drunk it my whole life,' paired with imagery and phrasing that critics said carried a sexualized double meaning about breast size, continuing a style the brand had used in print and outdoor ads for years.

In February 2019, Hainan's Haikou market regulator opened a formal investigation into the brand's advertising and had a related billboard taken down. The following month, on 18 March 2019, China's National Radio and Television Administration issued a nationwide notice ordering broadcasters to stop airing the flagged versions of the ad, saying the content 'pursued sensory stimulation for its own sake, promoted vulgar content, ran against social norms, and carried a distorted values message' likely to mislead viewers, especially minors.

Coconut Tree pushed back publicly, saying the tagline referred to customer trust and brand loyalty built over decades, not to any suggestive meaning, and noted the campaign had been previously cleared by the China Advertising Association and local regulators. The regulator's order stood regardless. It was not the brand's first or last such penalty — Haikou's market regulator had fined it before over similarly suggestive slogans, and in the years after 2019 the company was fined repeatedly again over comparable ad language, each time returning to variations on the same theme.