…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”.”
When I met Zia, a sales rep from Spotify, in 2008 I remember being completely in awe that a ‘new’ service based out of Sweden had managed to muscle in on the closed and rigid music market and had somehow convinced the labels that there was a new way to distribute their music. Most of us in the media department struggled to see how long it could last. It seemed ‘too good to be true’ for the user, and for the advertiser alike, targeting audio messages to a degree a radio spot never could, and offering a visual CTA at the same time.
I was working buying radio spots for Sony BMG at the time and had witnessed first hand the changes in the industry that iTunes and torrents had brought, and another of our clients, Zavvi, had gone into administration just before Christmas. The one constant, as the health of the radio listening figures was testament to, was that people wanted access to a lot of music and preferably for free.
Spotify has come a long way since then, a US launch, and Facebook integration among the landmark shifts and consumption of the service has exploded as it gains traction in The States. Functionality has increased to the point where you can now indulge pretty much any musical need, my own most recent fascination is creating a neverending recommendation engine out of the service by scrobbling tracks I play to last.fm and then creating an ever evolving Recommendations playlist with Soundmatch. I would strongly recommend it if you haven’t tried it and subscribe to Spotify premium.
Music consumption in the digital age is clearly an ever-evolving beat and it looks like the US might be nearly ready to share some of their other goodies with the rest of the world as services like Rdio and MOG come over, not to mention recently improved Deezer gaining some traction.
This deck from (tr)ad agency JWT spells out a few of the developments in the market form a global perspective highlighting new services (like shuffler.fm) exploring functional developments on existing mainstream services (like Shazam) and grouping them into trends…enjoy!
The TED talk below isn’t particularly new but I have only just found the time to watch this and it is something that I feel pretty passionately about so thought I would pop down a few thoughts.
In the 9 minute video, Eric Pariser takes us through his eloquent argument against the ‘personalisation’ of the web by algorithms set-up to increase the content you are exposed to that is of a similar kind to that you have previously engaged with.
The ‘Filter Bubble’ refers to your web, and the content inside it that is similar to that which you liked before. The perils of this mean that our interestes become ‘dumbed down’ increasing the sugar factor’ of entertainment vs challenging material.
The strange thing for me as a social media professional how few people actually know this outside media and advertising. Speaking to people about their Facebook news feed is perhaps the best demonstration, and people are astounded to know it’s probably only about 5% of the conversations that are going on that pop up in it. Notice your peripheral friends becoming more marginalised anyone?
Clay Shirky, the renowned ‘futurist’ and explainer of web trends is back on the talking circuit.
Following the tremendous success of ‘Here comes everybody…’, Clay lays down the hypothesis that in a post-tv (couch potato) world, we can achieve a lot more. With social networks and the power of the web, people are using their ‘spare brain power’ for that of good. His example is crisis crowdsource too Ushahidi, born out of the bloodshed after a disputed Presidential election.
I agree in a large part, we are able to get the most out of ourselves by using the linking and empowering potential of the web, its all about group action. However, the directions for use of these free brain hours are the same as always, and although we are problem solving to make life better in a civic way, we could just as easily find those that want ‘negative’ outcomes for everyone. The difference between those creating civic ‘good’ and civic ‘bad’ is the same as the differences that exist in life generally, and they can use the same tools to do either.
That said I am an altruist, and hope that the good that can be brought about but I am also aware that behaviours on the web more often than not follow patterns that already exist in day to day (offline) society.
Beware: He socks it to the LOLcats (mee no like that!)
Do ad execs dream of electric sheep? 