According to one of the Coca-Cola’s top marketers, few agencies really understand 360-degree marketing.
Pio Schunker, senior-vice-president, creative excellence for Coca-Cola North America, gave a rare glimpse inside client-side thinking at the third annual Future Flash conference yesterday.
The annual event is organized by the Institute of Communication Agencies as a thought-leadership conference. It features several keynote speakers from around the world.
Coca-Cola uses several agencies to cover its many markets and strategies. Under a previously loose managerial structure with no creative leader, this led to chaos, said Schunker.
“When I sit in agency pitches, I tend to hear things like ‘We’re 360-degree brand builders. We’re media agnostic,’ ” he said. “That’s exactly what we need, but what we get is agencies imposing their own agenda on us.”
Schunker said many agencies simply saw the account as an opportunity to bolster a television reel. If asked for an integrated campaign, agencies would retrofit strategies into pre-existing TV ideas, producing little more than “matching luggage” for the iconic red-and-white soda maker.
“We typically get a holding company presenting their network as the [360 solution],” Schunker said. “It tends to be a loose confederation of completely disjointed companies that are so busy fighting with each other to figure out who gets the business, they can’t be bothered to figure out how to solve our business.”
The result, according to Schunker, was a brand that lost its way in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Coke now places all of its agencies under the command of a single lead creative agency. With Wieden + Kennedy currently in that role, Schunker said the brand has been reinvigorated.
He lauded the single-message “Happiness” campaign that is currently in market for its simplicity.
Other first-day presentations included a 30-year statistical study of successful marketing strategies from Peter Field, a consultant with extensive agency experience in the U.K.
Jeff Swystun, chief communications officer for DDB Worldwide, gave the evening address and outlined how the modern audience is shifting from a herd to a swarm mentality.
