Coca Cola: “from creative excellence to content excellence.”

A recent article in Marketing Week profiles Coca Cola’s new advertising strategy (emphasis ours):

Speaking at the Guardian Changing Advertising Summit, [Coke’s Jonathan] Mildenhall says Coca Cola’s Content 2020 strategy aims to help its portfolio of brands gain a “disproportional share of popular culture”.

He says: “All advertisers need a lot more content so that they can keep the engagement with consumers fresh and relevant, because of the 24/7 connectivity. If you’re going to be successful around the world, you have to have fat and fertile ideas at the core.”

Coca-Cola wants consumer feedback to shape the creativity of the business and no longer relies on traditional agencies for ideas.

Instead, it is adopting a more collaborative approach through crowdsourcing, fans on Facebook and Twitter, and working directly with artists and the music and film industry to create content through storytelling.

We’ve written about Coke’s innovative and viral Happiness Machine in the past. Now, it appears that Coke is taking this one step further and declaring that content will be at the core of their advertising strategy, and no longer an experimental sideline.

Check out the video below where the narrator explains the change, “The purpose of content excellence is the create ideas so contagious, they cannot be controlled.” He later continues, “The conversation model we have developed begins with brand stories. These brand stories create liquid and linked conversations. These liquid and linked ideas provoke conversations. Then, we need to act and react to those conversations 365 days a year.”

What Coke is outlining here is a sophisticated social media plan. Notice that it doesn’t emphasize tactics or simply measures of activity and say “we shall tweet 5.5 times per day with the intention of driving traffic to our website.” It’s takes a higher, humanistic road, harnessing the power of storytelling, connecting with real people and hearing their stories.

Of course, Coke is still doing traditional advertising to compliment this effort. The 35 short videos made for the 2012 Superbowl prove it. They are, however, entirely re-thinking their marketing strategies in light of social technology-driven attention shifts. It’s fascinating to observe the world’s biggest brands recognize that social media presents them a huge opportunity, and one that they must approach in an entirely different manner than traditional advertising.

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