The
Battle For Coca-Cola
Rages
On.
Ain't
Nothing Like
The Real Thing, Maybe.
I
Don't Mean To Say
I Told You So, But...
Are
Consumers Smarter
Then We Are?.
The
Four Great Myths
Of Global Branding.
Mr
Bevis Butts Heads
At Mitsubishi
The
Best Laid Plans
Of Mice And Men.
Dare
to Be Great:
The Mad Genius of "The Matrix"
Mitsubishi's
New Marketing Boss
Out
Of The Frying Pan.
Concept Is Stronger Than Fact.
Value
Perception In A World
Gone Mad With "Cool"
The
Future of Advertising
The
Brand
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The Battle For Coca-Cola. First, let me start off by saying that I have been addicted to Coca-Cola ever since I was a small boy carrying a lead pipe to school to keep the big kids from snatching my lunch money. Not Diet Coke, not "New" Coke, or caffeine-free, sugar-free ( what's left) Coke or Cherry Coke, Vanilla Coke or any other half-assed line extension. Coke "The Real Thing" Cola. Gotta have it. |
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| I've worked on the brand off and on at four different agencies, so I have a fairly good grasp of the Coca-Cola corporate culture, |
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How do I get from where I am at this shit-pot agency in Tulsa to Madison Ave.? - F.T. Tulsa Practice-HW |
| From Warren Buffett ( their largest shareholder) to the LaGuardia Nacional troops that deliver the product into the backwaters of Latin America and the CIA operatives that call it's many global offices home, The Coca-Cola Company is a nation unto itself. And the business of Coca-Cola is Marketing. |
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thank you for coming up to talk to our marketing team. After you left we all wanted to slit our wrists for being so behind the curve- T.D.San Mateo Think how bad you would feel if you had already spent the money-HW |
| So, when Coke announced last week that worldwide growth would be less than 2% this year, that was the shot heard round the world. Coke's growth period under Roberto Goizueta was nothing less than spectacular. Coke's shares soared 3,500% in less than 16 years under Roberto's gifted leadership. |  |
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Since Roberto Goizueta's tragic death in on my birthday in 1997, his predecessors have been unable to come anywhere near anything but single digit numbers. This current wakeup call is the worst news yet. Nevill Isdell returned to Coke in early June as CEO, succeeding the retiring self proclaimed"change agent" Doug Daft. Now, Isdell's on the warpath. It certainly hasn't been for lack of inspiration or innovation that Coke is dragging it's global ass. Randy, Paula and Simon haven't been fronting Coke glasses for the past three years by accident. Steve Heyer, president and COO of Coke made that little gold mine of awareness building. It cost Coke $23 million. But it didn't move the needle for a company that spends a million dollars a day on marketing. That's because, although everybody watches American Idol, nobody equates the life and death posturings of countless around the block wannabes with their day to day life. Maybe that's why Heyer got fired, with a $23 million golden parachute to soften the blow. Coke is a day to day life kinda product. People who drink soft drinks are drinking less and less every year. To see why, check out Ruben Stodderd. Dude never met a calorie he didn't like. It's not like the CokeFolk haven't been beating the bushes for something new. They put their money on John Bergin and his global creative storm troopers at McCann-Erickson for decades. John retired after the Sergio Zyman's,"New Coke" fiasco. ( Which wasn't such a fiasco. It allowed Coke to shift from cane sugar ( Old Coke)to fructose (beet) sugar (Coke Classic) and save a king's ransom on every caseload.) After John Bergin left, McCann stumbled and Coke struck up a deal with Mike Ovitz and CAA. Mike brought in Len Fink and Shelly Hack to create the infamous CAA "Black Box" team. Coke paid out a lot of money in development fees for very little creative firepower and wound up back at McCann. Then the feeding frenzy began with creative assignments going to Lowe, Fallon, Burrell, Goodby and anybody else they could think of. At the same time the CMO dance began with Peter Sealy and a cast of thousands whipped through the revolving door. The latest cat on this hot tin roof is Chuck Fruit. Wait a minute. Do all of these names I've been spouting ring a bell? Fink,Hack,Lowe,and Daft. If you were convicted of a felony would you put your fate in the hands of a law firm named Fink,Hack,Lowe,and Daft? However. If cranberry, blackberry and passion flower flavored drinks were blasting away at your customer base, would you bring in a guy named Chuck Fruit to save the day? Damned straight, Jack. But I digress. Now that you've got the backstory on this Cola War, Here's the latest from the front lines. All this week, invited agencies who received their so-called"iconographic" brief from Atlanta have been rolling out their big guns to wow Coke Management. Coke is pulling out all the stops bringing in agencies from all over the globe to serve up the"Big Idea.'" Good luck. We turned the challenge over to the Resident Geniuses at "DoubleThink,' our own friendly neighborhood "Big Idea Company," created on these very pages out of Moxie and pixie dust two issues ago."Doublethink" crossed their heart and hoped to lie that they would work twice as hard as WPP Group's Berlin Cameron/Red Cell (which has has Coke Classic in the U.S. and created the current "Real" campaign); Interpublic's McCann Erickson (which still has the brand in certain international markets) and Campbell-Ewald in Detroit, Publicis Groupe's Publicis (which works for Coke's Minute Maid),as well as Independents Taxi in Toronto, which is not a roster shop, and London-based Mother, the agency for Coke Classic in the UK I tried to add up the combined Coke billings for all those agencies and my abacus broke. That's when I figured out that those guys I just mentioned would all be doing the exact same thing. Rubbing their hands together to see exactly how much of Coke's $300 million ad budget they could get their hands on and what whack-job jingle, camera trick or casting oddity would seal the deal. Well "Doublethink" doesn't have that problem. We don't give a fuck about how much money they spend. We only care about how much money they make. ( I'm a shareholder) Now since I shamed my readers for not raising their hands last week, a whole bunch of folks stepped up. I was surprised at the number of Hollywood heavy-hitters that were down to play. Ten of us got together at one of the guys digs on Broad Beach ( $8.2 mill for a beach pad he only goes to on weekends during the summer. He can roll wit da long dogz.) The result is an amazing display of off the wall global marketing smarts that Old School Madison Avenue agencies would never come up with in a billion eons. ( Yeah, Right. But we all had to start somewhere.) These Hollywood Hotshots whipped it off and never broke a sweat. You can drop by. Click here Check it out and tell us what you doublethink.
A Mind Is a Terrible Thing To Have. Every now and then somebody will be dumb enough to ask me whether or not I miss working on Madison Avenue day in and day out. I remind them that I still work on Madison Avenue but from my porch overlooking about 800 acres of undeveloped greenery in the Hollywood Hills. God bless the world wide web. I'm the guy they call in when everybody else has struck out and the account is about to go into an agency review. Agency reviews are a lot like hurricanes. They blow into an agency and suck everything that isn't nailed down out of the windows, including most of the people. Most agencies will do anything to avoid a review, even call my agent, bend over, apply their lubricant of choice and kiss their $20 to $50k good-bye. This way of working is where my "Legend" moniker sprang from. The agency guys never see me. Everything is conducted by e-mail or conference call. This week the Madison Avenue Walk of Fame was designated and announced the top five advertising slogans. They were selected from a field of 52 characters and slogans by a public vote on a Web site, sponsored by Yahoo and USA Today. About 600,000 people voted. My campaign, "A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste" was voted number four with 8% of the popular vote. The whole thing brought back the unpleasant truth of why I had to go into stealth mode to work on Madison Avenue. As the great Nat "King" Cole said in 1967 after a year of his NBC show going unsponsored for fear of White Southerner's boycotts, "Madison Avenue Is Afraid of the dark." 37 years later the State of New York and the Federal Government are still threatening to leverage significant fines on the advertising industry for its blatantly biased hiring practices. In 1984 after a triumph on "Quality Is Job 1," I was fired from Wells, Rich, Green as a result of the agency losing the Alka-Seltzer business. After that, I vowed to never work in an agency staff position again, just to be a sitting duck for whatever mishap befell the organization. I retained an excellent agent to circulate my award winning commercial reel to agencies in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, St. Louis, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. The deal was deceptively simple. I would work freelance for a given agency for six months at $10k a month to get to know them. Then I would work on an as needed basis month to month for $5k a month. My only caveat was that I would never come in to the agency for meetings, nor would I travel to clients or out on production. Once again, I became invisible. As the "Invisible Man" I had more work than I could handle. Every now and then an agency would decide that they just had to have me on staff. This was usually at the point that some lame-o creative director had flamed out and hit the wall, or jumped ship. Sometimes, out of hope, or boredom, or both I would follow through and actually allow myself to show up at one of these agencies. The scenario was invariably the same, year after year, decade after decade. I would call to confirm the appointment. They would tell me how excited everybody was to finally meet me after so many weeks ( months, years) and how much the clients loved my work. Then I would show up for the meeting. My first time in the agency. I would inspire "the look" the minute they laid eyes on me. You know that look. The one between "what the fuck?" and "who let this guy in here?" And then the tap dancing would begin to get me out of the door before too many people discovered their horrible mistake. Inviting a black guy in to talk about the job of Executive Creative Director. This can get pretty old, pretty quick. Especially when some of these ten minute turnarounds would happen after I had traveled half way across the country. So basically I retreated back into the shadows, told my agent to double my day rate and forgot about ever seeing these people face to face again. But fate has a way of fucking with you. This past Monday, after changing four of my 2.5 year old daughter's poopy diapers, I got a tip that a guy was looking for somebody to work on Microsoft. I drop the guy an e-mail. He calls me right back. He says,"I saw your work. It's great. Would you be interested in working full time?"The smell of baby-poop still strong in my nostrils, I say,"Sure." That's when I find out that this guy works for an agency that I had been employed by for three different tours of duty. Snickering to myself and knowing this is going nowhere, I agree to meet the guy. Here's where the quirk of fate comes in. The morning of the interview, my dearest friend and God Father to my daughter, Frank Coppola calls me from New York to tell me that my campaign , "A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste" was voted number four. I laugh hysterically. He wants to know what is so funny. I tell him I have a job interview at the agency I worked for to do that campaign. He said, "Must be a sign from God."I say, "Aim a little lower." The upshot of the interview with the creator of the number four campaign of all time was summed up by this comment (from the guy who asked over the phone,"I saw your work. It's great. Would you be interested in working full time?"). And I quote,"By the way, did you know that Saatchi and Saatchi is looking for a writer on Toyota?" The more things change, the more they remain the same. But I'm officially voting to change the slogan for my next job interview fiasco, to read, "My Time Is A Terrible Thing To Waste." Uncle Marty Gets the Gold I don't know about the rest of you, but I would much rather watch Marty Scorsese in front of the camera than most of his recent efforts behind the camera. One of my recent on camera favs was an American Express spot he did for the Tribeca Film Festival Sponsorship from AmEx. In the spot, Marty is picking up his photos from a one hour photo joint and giving us the shot by shot critique of his coverage of his nephew's birthday spot. It is certainly one of the best written spots in the recent campaign and copywriter Stewart Krull is to be congratulated for his rapid-fire Scorsese monologue. The spot runs for 60 seconds and it had me in stitches. Art Director Frank Guzzone's decision to shoot Marty late night from the front door and behind the counter clerk's POV keeps the spot in your face and wondering if this kind of thing actually happens in the lives of our larger than life auteurs. The spot won Clio Gold for Creative Directors Davis Apicella, Chris Minton and Terry Finley as well as Hungry ManŐs Director, Jim Jenkins, who had the unenviable task of saying, "Eh, Marty...Could you be a little more "Marty" in this next take...Annnd...Action." My favorite line, " Jimmy, it's your Uncle Marty. How'd you like to turn five again?" By the way, terrific cutting by Chris Franklin from Big Sky. My old friend Tamira Spirling produced for Ogilvy & Mather in NY. Take a look. Click here
Stay Tuned. |
MARKETERS
FROM OGILVY
& MATHER ADRANTS BANK
OF AMERICA DELTA
AIR LINES
And
You. |