The introduction of Coca-Cola’s “Real Magic” marketing platform two years ago has helped the brand celebrate the unexpected moments that elevate everyday life.
And like so many other brands, the beverage giant has more recently turned to generative AI to bolster “Real Magic” through innovative design and unique experiences, all while harnessing the holy grail of marketing: first-party data.
With fast-paced adoption of GenAI, the 130-year-old brand has rolled out its first AI-created limited edition flavor, Y3000 Zero Sugar, through the Coca-Cola Creations platform.
Coca-Cola Creations, developed not long after the “Real Magic” platform, designs products intended to appeal to younger consumers through external collaborations. Those have included Coca-Cola Marshmello, Soul Blast, Dreamworld and Byte.
“We started with generative AI to produce a mood board and ultimately help us design the packaging and the identity,” Javier Meza, svp of European marketing for Coca-Cola, told Adweek. “It has this lovely combination of human intelligence with AI, which I believe is also the future of AI.”
The process involves partnerships with ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Coca-Cola’s dedicated creative agency Open X within WPP.
Like most marketers (or most humans, really), Meza is aware of both the promise and the unknowns of artificial intelligence: “There’s been a lot of rushing to embrace the technology, but we believe it’s an opportunity to amplify humans, not replace humans,” said Meza, who has been with the company for 26 years.
It starts with insights into consumer taste, preferences and trends that the company has always needed to stay relevant on the international stage. Those insights are then used as prompts for GenAI tools to create proposals and brand outcomes for the marketing team to take forward.
We are operating with dual velocity. On one side, we are learning by doing. … We also have people thinking and strategizing.
Javier Meza, svp of marketing, Coca-Cola
The tech is also allowing the team to explore larger data sets to discover deeper consumer insights, though that capability is currently only in an internal pilot phase, Meza revealed.
AI is also helping Coke create content, explored earlier this year at the first Real Magic Creative Academy, a symposium held at Coke’s Atlanta headquarters that brought together technologists, artists and consumers from around the world to explore the potential of artificial intelligence.
“We are operating with dual velocity. On one side we are learning by doing, and we have a group of people already who are bringing the technology in and starting to experiment very fast. But we also have people thinking in the longer term and strategizing,” he explained.
AI will also be used in automating some marketing functions, with the company looking to the tools for attribution modeling insights and helping to better understand potential returns on investment.
After just a few months of testing and implementation, Meza believes AI is a permanent part of The Coca-Cola Company.
Creating experiences and measuring success
The Y3000 Zero Sugar launch allowed consumers to scan an on-pack QR code to access the Coca‑Cola Creations hub. There, they can filter photos through the custom AI camera to see what their current reality could look like in the future. The initiative sees Coca-Cola partner with fashion brand Ambush, with user creations set to inspire real-life products in the Y3000 Capsule Collection, which will be available to purchase later this autumn.
And at the recent EDM festival Tomorrowland in Belgium, fans could scan a QR code on limited-edition cans to try out an exclusive Instagram filter and a curated playlist on Spotify.
“We are now really embracing this model of the relationship between the brand and the consumer by bringing to life experiences in this type of digital environment, and what allows us to create and amplify these experiences is data,” said Meza.
The data being collected at experiences like these allows the company to track behavioral segmentation, which means moving away from just looking at consumer demographics. Marketers will now have data that will allow Coca-Cola to segment consumers based on behavior toward the category and its portfolio.
Commenting on the strategy, Gracie Page-Fozzati, former director of emerging tech at VMLY&R and now founding partner of The Building Blocks, said mining data for actionable insights was one of the hardest jobs modern CMOs face.
“Consumers have grown weary of giving their data away for free only to be monetized to the tune of billions of dollars by large corporations, making first party data that is consensually shared with trusted brands even more important than before,” she said. “Although the shiny headlines currently garnered by AI in the creative industries focus on aesthetic outputs, it will be an invaluable tool to aid with the analysis of these growing first party data sets at scale as we shift from an attention economy to an ownership economy.”
Internal structural innovation
Coca-Cola has been reorganizing its marketing team globally to improve collaboration. Nine operating units have been created, including one in Europe, working alongside the global team in Atlanta.
They work as a network to share creative and category insights that, according to Meza, allowed the marketing teams to take advantage of larger opportunities and scale fast.
“The structures are mirrored in all the geographies in which we operate. It is easy for them to connect, to know who to speak to to make things happen fast,” said Meza, who led Latin America marketing for two years from Atlanta before moving to Coke’s Dublin office in February.
Shakir Moin, head of marketing for Coca-Cola North America, explained that the international structure, called network marketing, allows marketers to share learnings and work together to tackle the biggest challenges as one team.
“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,” Moin explained during a conversation at Brandweek earlier this month.
Meza’s vision for Coca-Cola Europe
In running the marketing for Europe, Meza is focused on creating a legacy for his team while raising up the next generations of marketing leaders.
“That’s definitely important, and it has to do not only with embracing technology, but also and moving them across the different markets in which we operate. In Europe, there is a good diversity of markets, and we can learn a lot by working in those environments,” he said.
External priorities include developing an “ecosystem of partners,” which includes WPP.
“We have no recipe for other partnerships,” he added, “so I’m going to spend a good part of my time connecting with those external partners and making sure that they understand our agenda, and they can bring value to us and vice versa.”
