Marketing manifesto for the 21st Century – Coca Cola Content 2020 (Part 1 & 2)

‘Holidays’s are coming, holidays are coming…’

…well ok, they’ve just been, but it seems an appropriate time of year to highlight the marketing feats that have come out of The Coca-Cola Company over the last few decades. The arrival of the Coke truck, the cuddly polar bears, the big red and white Santa have all been synonymous with Christmas or ‘Holiday’, evoking warm memories in consumers hearts ever since I have been born and long before.

The Company has managed to use it’s communications with consumers to claim ‘ownership’ of Christmas, to mark the start of it even (as several of my friends tweets/fb posts will testify), to sell their chilled sweetened beverages.

The Christmas Coke strategy hasn’t been the only great feat to come out of The Company’s marketing efforts, and across the range they are responsible for a great catalogue of interesting and successful work. However, as a brand with such a heritage they have, like other big brands, had to work out how to continue such success in an increasingly complex, changing, fragmented and uncertain marketing world. To do this they have set out their stall and formulated a recipe for marketing success in the 21st century in the below 2 films.

They attempt to answer the questions on every 21st Century marketer’s lips:

– How to get to grips with new technologies
– How to cope with moving away from reliance on the TVC and the core idea often encapsulated within it, adding layers to it with other channels
– How to leverage content and tie it back to unifying brand proposition
– How to be answer the demand of ‘always on’ comms
– How to use agency and content providers
– How to divide their budgets to ensure results and testing
– How to research their work and derive quality learnings and useable insights

In the spirit of transparency, they have shared their work with these ‘RSA Animate‘ style animated films, uploaded to YouTube and boldly open for all including competitors to see.

Here they are, hopefully much more coherent than my waffle. Erm… ‘Enjoy’

Part 1

Part 2

Video synopsis:
“The media landscape is a very different beast today than it was even 5 years ago. Then agency-led television commercials dominated how we channel our marketing. The very fact you are reading this here proves that things have changed. Coca Cola have always been at the forefront of innovation. In this video Jonathan Mildenhall, Vice-President, Global Advertising Strategy and Creative Excellence at The Coca-Cola Company is the person responsible for leading global creative vision and strategy for the Company’s portfolio of global brands. In this video he explains how Coke will leverage the opportunities in the new media landscape and transform one-way storytelling into dynamic storytelling hoping to add value and significance to peoples lives. Jonathan describes the challenge of content creation in an enlightening way, reminding us that “every contact point with a customer should tell an emotional story”.”

---