The Coca-Cola Company is hoping to start the yr strong with creative that connects the dots between the marketer’s family of products and family gatherings. Notably, the campaign brings together its portfolio of brands inside a single spot for the primary time.
“When we talk portfolio, it is generally more of a register- and sales-driving move. That’s obviously how people see us on the shelf. But [Coca-Cola Chief of Marketing Shakir Moin] is all the time pushing us to try to give consumers goosebumps,” said Alex Ames, director of content and inventive excellence at Coca-Cola North America. “We’re really looking to tell the story of that completely imperfect family, similar to the right family of products that we’ve at Coca-Cola, and once we began unpacking that, that’s where the magic happened.”
The campaign developed out of conversations with partners at Majority, a diversity-focused creative agency that is an element of Coca-Cola’s OpenX arrangement with global marketing partner WPP (the holding company acquired a 30% stake in Majority last yr). The central idea flowed from taking Coca-Cola’s standing as a sponsor for major properties just like the Olympics and the World Cup and bringing it into the house, making the brand the “proud sponsor” of moments that matter most.
The result’s “New Guy,” a spot directed by Christopher Storer, creator and showrunner for Hulu’s hit series “The Bear,” who has made capturing the chaos of perfectly imperfect families his stock in trade. The ad, in 30- and 90-second versions, recalls “Fishes,” a second-season episode of the show that focused on an intense Christmas dinner — perhaps unusual inspiration for an ad from the beverage giant.
Majority presented an concept that was part “The Bear” and part Homer’s “Odyssey,” and thru some serendipity, Coca-Cola was able to work with half of that formulation through production partner Smuggler, Ames explained.
“Homer died over 2000 years ago, so to have the option to work with the opposite inspiration in Chris Storer was just an incredible stroke of luck,” he said.
“New Guy” captures the experience of bringing home a recent paramour for the primary time. The spot captures the chaos of a family gathering at the vacations, with food within the oven, kids under foot and sports on TV. The “recent guy” meets a handful of family members — all of whom mistakenly assumed he can be short — on his way to securing a firm handshake with the family’s patriarch.
In pre-production, one of Coca-Cola’s few notes was that the brand’s products can be a central part of the forged, they usually are organically woven into the narrative, including drinking Sprite to cool down after a bite straight from the oven, Honest juice boxes for the children and the weird relative and a Coke Zero Sugar brandished during a sports argument.
“Quite a bit of brands on the market on this planet couldn’t do a story like this, but we’re lucky where we’ve these brands which can be all so well-defined with their place within the portfolio,” Ames noted.
To create an ad focused on family and a family of products, Storer used as much of the family-like forged and crew from “The Bear” as possible. In kind, Ames describes the client-agency side of video village as a family affair, with many relationships across the divide dating back years.
“It was just this unbelievable family feel, and with family comes trust. We got the script and we got what was boarded, but there was trust that comes with family, and bringing recent people into your family, identical to the spot,” Ames explained. “It gave the liberty of letting Chris Storer do what Chris Storer does so well.”
Apart from the TV spot production, the campaign is backed by almost 40,000 individual pieces of creative that may run across programmatic, out-of-home, display and beyond. The assets align consumer insights around product, messages and imagery to let the marketer mix-and-match to find one of the best incremental opportunities.
Despite the high volume of creative assets, the work was primarily done by humans — not generative artificial intelligence, regardless that Coca-Cola has quickly turn out to be a pacesetter in applying the tech in promoting. Instead of AI driving creative ideation or asset creation, Ames says the technology will help automate some of the insight generation on the back end. Plus, the wealth of creative can now be used to help train AI to do more in the longer term, especially around how the ad is served.
“There are some things that we’re not necessarily, as an industry, comfortable with giving AI complete carte blanche,” Ames said. “We’ve been leveraging it, but how does it augment the human creativity that an agency like Majority and WPP brings to the table?”
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