Coca-Cola is No Longer a Traditional Advertiser
At the Adobe Summit this week, Coca-Cola’s head of digital, David Godsman said, in this digital age, fans of the brand are key to its content creation strategy.
A year ago, Coca-Cola began a five-year digital transformation program that put it in to four key buckets: operations, business, culture and experiences, The Drum reported.
Marketing and operations fills the “experiences” bucket. Godsman said that he is challenging his “traditional brand marketers to become experience makers.”
“Digital allows us to create unifying experiences which—regardless of language or place in the world—helps to bring them together,” he said as reported by The Drum. “Digital enables them to participate actively with us and co-create the experiences we bring to market. We don’t see a world where we will continue as a traditional advertiser in that sense.”
Under one initiative that began last October, Coca-Cola turned from its standard agency call for new designs for its sponsorship of the 2020 Tokyo games to recruiting new talent from across the globe. Loyalists and others were asked to create their own inspirational Olympic-themed identity for the games.
The crowd-sourced campaign, “Coke x Adobe x You,” is in partnership with Adobe. Entrants use Coca-Cola marks and Adobe’s Creative Cloud suit of editing apps to create the designs. At the start, Coca-Cola selected just 15 artists. The number of submission now tops 1,500. The participants are encouraged to share their work on Behance, Instagram or Twitter using the hashtag #cokexadobexyou. The designs are being added to a digital gallery to drive excitement for the Tokyo 2020 games.
At the time, Coca-Cola said it would donate up to $30,000 to the Special Olympics for every entry it received by Dec. 31, 2017.
Coca-Cola has deep roots with the Special Olympics. It is a founding partner and has, over its 48-year relationship, raised more than $180 million for the organization.
