Since introducing “Real Magic” as its creative brand platform in September 2021, Coca-Cola has been on a journey of exploration using stories that aim to entertain and amaze, incorporating new technologies along the way.
Speaking at Brandweek in Miami, Coca-Cola’s marketing chief for North America, Shakir Moin, told Adweek’s chief experience officer Jenny Rooney that its marketers have been keeping up with emerging innovations by improving internal communications globally. The beverage giant implemented “network marketing,” which enables its marketers to share learnings and work together to tackle the biggest challenges as one team.
Part of the aim with this method is to aid Coca-Cola’s ambition to reach consumers internationally and across generations, all the while recognizing that things in society will continually change. This transformation is something Moin and his team tries to measure on a monthly basis for both the short and mid-term.
Moin highlighted the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on people’s behaviors, which shifted at a rate never before recorded in terms of the adoption of new technology.
“One fundamental shift that we are going through is moving away from the notion of destination-based outcomes that assume that the path toward whatever you’re going toward is fixed. And what we are learning is [it’s] not linear at all, it never has been,” he explained. “There’s a certain level of education that our marketers and our systems need that there’s going to be constant change.
“That is a little bit unnerving because people want stability, but it cannot be. We are no longer in a world where you can work without variables, you have to constantly be conscious and comfortable with rapid change.”
The latest outcome of this working method was released this week: Y3000 Zero Sugar, a new Coke Creations drink developed using AI.
Arguably the largest transformational change taking place currently is the introduction of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), which marketers and creatives have begun to invest in and explore its power to develop and enhance creative work.
As an example of the “Real Magic” platform, the session began by showing Coca-Cola’s most recent major brand campaign “Masterpiece,” which was released earlier this year and featured AI technology to tell the story of a gallery where the art comes to life.
Moin spoke about the company’s brands as both a product and a promise, driven by imagination.
“A story is narrative imagined,” he claimed. “And today there will be billions of narratives in the world, but they’re not stories. The difference between a story vs. a narrative is the element of imagination, which is where creativity comes in.”
He also explained that AI was able to help create the campaign and realize elements of the work of the 11 artists in a way that could not have been done just a few years before.
“The element of craft and the obsession over craft is critical because five years back, we could not do this with the precision that we were able to use. The timing and the cost, because each artist has a different lens of colors, brushstrokes, style—what AI was able to do was to help us be true to the genre of the artists.”
