What you need to know:

• Coca-Cola’s global CMO and EVP, Manolo Arroyo set a vision: To become the best marketing team in the world – not just by a little, but a lot. The challenge is that the FMCG has close to 2 billion touchpoints every day, from drinking, scanning, to playing our games, representing millions of ways to interact. But it didn’t know who these consumers were, said head of global marketing technology, Shekhar Gowda.
• Working in partnership with Adobe and WPP, Coca-Cola has rolled out the martech vendor’s stack including Workfront as an orchestration layer for unifying marketing operations work globally.
• It’s also brought thousands of websites down to a single platform, as well as created playbooks that allow 180 brand leaders across the business to innovate but within the guardrails of a unified marketing and brand portfolio approach
• Through these efforts Coca-Cola has been able to understand and prove out known consumers spend 27 per cent more than unknown consumers. Other highlight figures include 160 per cent higher engagement in CRM, plus 76 per cent lower cost per acquisition.
• Coca-Cola has built out 152m actionable consumer profiles in 129 countries. Across this, it’s applying 2,200 customer segments, with 27 data sources contributing to profile richness. Off the back of this, 240m journeys and 22m SMSs have been sent, 117 destinations, dataflows such as Meta, TikTok, Google customer match.
• Coca-Cola has 800-plus brand and campaign websites migrated to Experience Platform. Off the back of this, it has seen 63 per cent uplift on personalised content versus default content in sociable feasts. Other highlights include 44 per cent visitor-initiated login, and a 22 per cent clickthrough rate on personalised emails.

How do you get to know, then market personally to millions upon millions of consumers when you have nearly 2 billion touchpoints every day with a largely unknown set of customers across the globe?

This is what was confronting the Coca-Cola’s global martech operations team as it looked to realise a vision set by the FMCG giant’s global CMO and EVP, Manolo Arroyo: Become the best marketing team in the world – not just by a little, but a lot.

“The challenge is that we sell products across the globe; every day, there are close to 2 billion touchpoints every day, from drinking, scanning, to playing our games. There are millions of ways to interact. But we truly don’t know who these consumers are,” Coca-Cola Company global head marketing technology, Shekhar Gowda, told attendees during a session at this year’s Adobe Summit.

“That’s due to the complexity of our ecosystem of partners, bottlers, customers, retailers. The challenge was how do we get to know what our consumer really wants. Our mission is we want to reach 2bn consumers to understand their needs and how we satisfy those needs. Our motto is to be a total beverage company that refreshes the world.”

Adding complexity was the fact Coca-Cola had thousands of agency partners globally, at least 1,000 separate websites it knew of (and a bunch more campaign specific microsites no one had tracked), and operations in 220 countries with 180 brands. At any given second, a customer and commerce experience is happening with one of its products.

Then there was the tech challenge. The 138-year-old FMCG had fragmented tech stacks, along with multiple partners. Digital operations was operating in silos from other marketing capabilities, there was high duplication of largely untracked assets worldwide, and it lacked consistent objectives and key results (OKRs).

To kickstart a journey towards building a global standard marketing and brand platform globally and get to personalised consumer engagement, Coca-Cola set up a partnership with WPP/VML and Adobe and embarked on one of the largest Adobe martech rollouts undertaken globally to date.

“At the same time, operations are critical for us – and that was fragmented,” Gowda continued. “We’re in 220 countries and were very siloed. Asset creation was done inside each country, and we couldn’t measure how many assets were created or used.”

A key step towards a unified marketing platform was establishing an experience loop Coca-Cola could use to track marketing end-to-end, from brief creation to execution, with creative as well as finance teams involved so it can see how dollars are invested and how it’s performing against what consumers want. To help, Coca-Cola rolled out on Adobe Workfront as an orchestration layer to manage the workflow and collaboration process.

Coca-Cola is working with plenty of other tech partners too, from Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and S4 Hana. “You name a tech we have it, but it’s orchestrated through Workfront,” Gowda said.  

Building the global marketing playbook

In concert, Coca-Cola worked with WPP to create ‘Studio X’, a consolidated agency model within WPP in every one of Coca-Cola’s nine zones globally. This customised agency approach is performing most marketing operations, from emails to media management, buying and planning, plus social listening. (The set-up was praised by both CEO James Quincey and CFO John Murphy with driving growth following the firm's most recent financial results).

As tech and agency elements began to be organised, two playbooks were created. The first is ‘Drive efficiency & scale’ with global enterprise standardisation.

“We have 180 brands, which means we had 180 very creative brand managers always wanting to do something new. It’s not always easy to standardise creativity,” Gowda said. “This is about colouring within the lines. We have built a platform to give marketers the ability to launch a campaign for example. They get their own brand guidelines... but we build once, and rolled out globally. There’s still the freedom around brand but it’s done within same platform. This was a big platform play, and we actually push Adobe on innovation, helping to build their products at the same time and learn from that.”

The second playbook is ‘Promote rapid innovation’ through a global centre of excellence led by Gowda.

“We are the engine for this marketing transformation, from production to analysis. At the same time, we build consumer journeys,” he explained.

The work done

WPP started working with Coca-Cola in 2021 to begin realising the value of tech investments in terms of the consumer as well as commercially, said VML Map client partner, Caroline Balschmidt.

“We are taking the old campaigns and turning them into data-driven capabilities we can realise and scale across 200+ markets and brands,” she said. “That’s the power of this model.”

Unifying and collecting first-party data has traditionally been a tough gig in FMCGs. But Balschmidt said “great content, a connected ecosystem with deep expertise in driving personalisation and marketing automation at scale has turned this 176 million known consumers right now into real assets for the Coca-Cola Company”.

Supporting first-party data collection and utilisation is something WPP labelled the ‘CAN’ framework – collect, activate, nurture.

“We collect, because we acquire the right people by bringing in the right audiences through our paid acquisition campaigns; we activate and create great experiences across all channels; and we nurture those relationships,” Balschmidt said. “We continue to enrich these profiles using the data consumer give us to build out personalisation, build more relevance, and ultimately drive consumption and brand love. That’s the opportunity here.”

Top-line numbers include consent-based data on 220m consumers globally, and activation of 26m monthly known active and engaged users across owned digital platforms. In addition, WPP said it’s mapped 10 new attributes to assign to customer profiles, including brand preference and passion points.

“This ‘One XP’ or one experience as WPP calls it, is about creating a unified brand presentation while being really intentional about how we capture people’s data and apply this… that means a lot of this business.”

Results

Technically, Coca-Cola has now taken 1,000-plus websites down to 116, all based on one Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) instance. There’s a single sign-up solution and promotion engine. It’s also migrated 18,000 pages and 62,000 assets into a streamlined content supply chain.

“One of the real need states was to take the very dispersed website and digital applications and portfolio and transition from thousands of websites into one, composable structure,” Balschmidt continued.

But Gowda said the business problem was not just consolidating websites. “Traditionally, we were very brand driven… for the first time, we realised the power of the portfolio. What this brings us is a portfolio approach to all brands together in a consistent way. That’s one of the key business wins,” he said.

“The second thing we had thousands of websites – we don’t even know how many, we couldn’t track them. Every campaign used to create a website – that would go on for six months and didn’t even know what we had. Today, we innovate in a unified way around the globe. That gives us cost efficiency, but also a really global portfolio approach.”

Through these efforts, Coca-Cola has also been able to understand and prove out known consumers spend 27 per cent more than unknown consumers. Other highlight figures include 160 per cent higher engagement in CRM, plus 76 per cent lower cost per acquisition.

Within Adobe Workfront, Coca-Cola now has 622 projects and 1,022 users. Balschmidt said the portal allows people to interact and collaborate, powered by AI matching the right projects to the right people at the right time.

“One of the questions is how Coca-Cola then gets these personalised experiences into marketing and in front of consumers. One piece of the puzzle is getting a single view of the customer, then how we get to build that at scale,” she said.

Balschmidt said it then built a program using the CAN frameworks, taking activations in old channels such as digital channels and push, and working to create a more personalised, cohesive journey across this ecosystem. All this with a heavy emphasis on collecting first-party data along the way. It’s now leveraging this by taking it into paid media activities.

“Understanding what audiences really drive the value when you come to the table in partnership is what creates the difference when you get into the loyalty and nurturing of relationships over time,” she said.

Speaking the same language was critical to making this whole model work, added Adobe head of industry strategy and marketing consumer goods, Bruce Richards.

“Making sure it wasn’t just about adding a tech solution that was going to port this thing; we were all onboard with where we should go,” he said. “It was pulling together all our respective tools – that exist with Coca-Cola, WPP and Adobe – to make this a success. That is where the magic happened... We weren’t just a tech partner, we were a strategy partner with all these guys in terms of pushing each other and making the triangulation successful.”

So far, Coca-Cola has built out 152m actionable consumer profiles in 129 countries. Across this, it’s applying 2,200 customer segments, with 27 data sources contributing to profile richness. Off the back of this, 240m journeys and 22m SMSs have been sent, 117 destinations, dataflows such as Meta, TikTok, Google customer match.

Managing its assets meanwhile is a Global DAM Live, now used by 15,000 global users covering more than 800,000 digital assets.

Coca-Cola has 800-plus brand and campaign websites migrated to Experience Platform. Off the back of this, it has seen 63 per cent uplift on personalised content versus default content in sociable feasts. Other highlights include 44 per cent visitor-initiated login, and a 22 per cent clickthrough rate on personalised emails.

Actioning first-party consumer data

One of the tricky questions Gowda said his team was getting when asking for investment dollars to build this consumer database was what marketing was going to do with it.

“We have over 1bn impressions every month. Say we convert all of those into AEP [Adobe Experience Platform], what are we going to do with it? That’s where the whole content investment comes in. Can we have enough content to communicate with 1 billion people every day? It’s a huge investment – sending 1bn text messages isn’t free; we have to pay for that,” he said.  

In response, Coca-Cola is working to pick the right audience for the right communication, using micro-moments around their passion points such as music and sports.

“We do audience planning and make sure we reach the right person with right message,” Gowda said. “Within that journey, personalising that content is very important. To do that, you need to know consumers better. We’re not yet at the contextualised micro-moments phase but that’s the goal we have. We’re close to 180m well-known consumers. What we want to do is go beyond saying I know you like music, but do you like coffee? If you do, I’ll send you my content around that; if you’re a tea person I’ll send you down my tea pathway. That’s the level of detail we want to know.  

“The caveat is we don’t want to be creepy marketers or follow you wherever you go. We want you to come back to me and say Coca-Cola is adding value to my life. It’s about being very personalised, contextualised on a needs basis, reach out to you.”