Coke Starts 2012 Social Media Activity

The Coca-Cola Company is stepping-up its campaign co-creation and social media activity in the run up to next year’s Olympic Games in London.

Speaking at yesterday’s Media Guardian Changing Advertising Summit, Jonathan Mildenhall, VP global advertising strategy and content, said the company has increased its content production budget by 30%, compared with the Beijing Olympic games in 2008, for next year’s event.

“We are producing about 120 different pieces of content with artists such as Mark Ronson as well as athletes that will be competing in the tournament,” he said.

Mildenhall also told attendees the company was stepping up its digital strategy as it attempts to double in size over the next ten years.

The strategy has seen Coca-Cola remodel how it works with traditional advertising agencies to embrace digital communication channels, such as Facebook and Twitter, according to Mildenhall.

The digital focus will see the soft drinks giant, which also own brands including Fanta and Sprite, increase its efforts to crowd source creative content via social media.

“If you’re going to be successful on multiple screens 24 hours a day then you have to have a lot of content,” he said. “We used to get this from traditional agencies but now we can get it from everywhere.”

The Coca-Cola Company will continue to work with traditional creative agencies as part of the strategy, but it is putting a greater emphasis on co-creation of its brand communications with social media users.

“We need to evolve from one-way story telling to dynamic story telling… that creates a coordinated brand experience,” he said. “The responsibility of the client is to mange the collaboration and integration process.”

Speaking in a separate session, Karla Geci, Facebook’s strategic partner for development, discussed the developments announced at the recent F8 developer conference.

“Everything that we announced at F8 was about the expansion of the Open Graph… Those connections can create new business models,” she said.

“There’s not really a commercial angle [behind the new developments] today but it does open the doors to potential new revenue opportunities.”

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