How Coca-Cola Turned Asia-Pacific into a Creative Engine

Small Worlds. Share a Coke. Happiness from the Skies. Coca-Cola’s innovation in Asia-Pacific is undeniable, so there’s little point really asking ‘why’ it was named this year’s Advertiser of the Year by Spikes Asia. A more instructive question to ask is ‘how’. How did one of the more middling creative regions in the Coke family leap ahead to become an innovation powerhouse? LBB’s Laura Swinton met up with Peter Schelstraete, Group Marketing Director, Asia Pacific Group, to find out more.

LBB> What was your response when you learned you’d won this year’s Spikes Advertiser of the Year award?

PS> First of all, it is a great honour and I am very excited for our marketing teams and creative partners in Asia. Up ‘til about five years ago, Asia was not yet a strong creative engine for Coca-Cola on the global stage. Our deliberate efforts to invest in and developing IMC talent and building a strong network of creative partners in Asia is now resulting in some significant wins for us 

But this also puts more weight on our shoulders for the future. We all know we still have a long way to go to stay ahead of the curve. The beverage market is evolving rapidly and the pace of change in communications and media is tremendous, so we cannot rest on our laurels. 

LBB> As a brand, what do you think the key is to achieving advertising that is brave, innovative, creative- and successful?

PS> In essence, it is what I would call a ‘Brand Handover’:  the ability to hand over a brand idea to the consumers and have it truly owned by people outside the company.  This may be uncomfortable for many companies, especially big brands, where there is a tendency to tighten control over the execution of how the brand comes to live. However, if you are able to define a powerful brand idea, it allows more people to express their personalised vision of the brand, building a personal relationship with the brand. A strong brand idea serves as a magnet that draws people to it, and helps unleash creativity as opposed to controlling it tightly. 

LBB> Which Coca-Cola advertising/marketing projects from the past year really exemplify the spirit of the brand in the Asia Pacific region?

There are quite a few.

Share a Coke

“Share a Coke” – This is special to me for many reasons.  First, the idea originated from the Asia Pacific – Australia. As the campaign resonates everywhere across the world, we have launched it in multiple markets both within Asia and outside the Asia Pacific region. Particularly for Asia Pacific, the idea of a global brand to agree to taking its name ‘off’  its product and truly personalise it to local cultures, local insights is very powerful and very special.  In China it is about Internet nicknames and song lyrics. This year’s ‘Share a Coke, Share a Song’ has to date reached 3 billion social media impressions. I also love how Share a Coke is about adjectives and nicknames in places like Thailand and Korea or helping us to celebrate the power of the Japan National Team making it to the world stage in Japan.  We continue to learn how we can bring social, interactivity and cultural relevance to life through Share a Coke, like the huge interactive building display or cheering the Olympic athletes into the names in Korea.  Recently we launched ‘the Happiest Thank You’ in the Philippines, which I would consider the most emotional and culturally relevant take on Share a Coke.  It is an inspirational reminder that a simple ‘thank you’, personalised with people’s names, can create a big emotional impact. After a week, the film had 1.5 million views on YouTube and was chosen ad of the week by several publications. 

FIFA World Cup

2014 was also the year of the FIFA World Cup. For us, it was an opportunity to push our communication approach into unchartered waters. The overall creative idea was global, but the way it came to life locally was what made the campaign powerful. 

For example, we toured the FIFA World Cup Trophy in several countries in Asia, including Myanmar where we had just launched Coca-Cola one year ago. 

In Japan we created a ‘Happy Stadium’, a stadium with football players and supporters being represented by Coke bottles. The activities during the World Cup matches garnered 36,574 re-tweets, 25,200 favourites and 327,382 Vine loops.

In Korea our ‘World Cup Zone’ super fan videos during Korea’s 1st National Team game achieved the highest consumer responses ever in just one day, ranking us in the top 3 RT account in Korea during the game time. 70,122 fans reacted within 24 hours and there were almost 500,000 views of our video content in Facebook.

In India, despite being a cricket country, 1.9 million stories were created on Facebook in 30 days.  #footballwithCoke trended on Twitter for 30 hours and garnered 530 million impressions.

Indonesia stood out because of strong collaborations with Google, Twitter and Facebook.  Our local version of Coca-Cola’s World Cup anthem ‘Dunia Kita’ (‘The World is Ours’, a musical collaboration between Brazilian David Correy and the upcoming Indonesian artist Millane Fernandez), has garnered almost 4.3 million views on YouTube.

Happiness from the Skies

‘Happiness from the Skies’ is a good testimony of our communication innovation incubators which we set up across Asia to focus on developing ideas that resonate with Asians. ‘Happiness from the Skies’ is a campaign which we developed in collaboration with the Singapore Kindness Movement, where we leveraged drones to share Coke and messages of gratitude from Singaporeans to construction workers. 

LBB> What are the biggest challenges for brands working in the Asia-Pacific region right now?

PS> In my opinion, the key challenge remains in creating a stronger link between our marketing communications and operations. At Coca-Cola many of our key opportunities are in the area of availability, pricing and in-market execution. Great communications can be an amazing complement to great execution, but it cannot compensate for bad execution. The same would apply for many of the other brands. To use a football analogy: a strong team is built on the basis of a strong defence. Similar to the ‘Total Football’ strategy many successful teams in the World Cup have used, we need more of ‘Total Marketing’. 

LBB> Aside from picking up the awards, what in particular are you looking forward to seeing/doing at Spikes 2014?

PS> It is always a great opportunity to be inspired by great ideas and execution, and to be able to meet current and future creative partners and young Asian marketing talent. Asia is buzzing with talent, ideas and innovation; Spikes 2014 will be THE place to be to start new creative ventures. 

LBB> Moving forward, I was also wondering if there were any particular tech developments (iBeacons, Apple Pay…etc) that you were looking forward to experimenting with as communications tools for the brand?

PS> We are in the midst of ‘experimenting’ with these technologies through our innovation incubators. This space is one of the most exciting for the future of marketing; not just as a way to communicate, but also to create a totally different level of multi-dimensional experience and loyalty.  Right now most of our packaging, coolers, vending machines and pieces of point of sales material are ‘dumb’, but this will change over time.