Coke’s Content Plan To Dominate Popular Culture by 2020

By Mark A Carbone, Co-Editor, CaseStudiesOnline.com

Recently, Coke was so bold, they shared their marketing plan with the world on how they will own a disproportionate share of the conversations of popular culture by the year 2020.  The mastermind behind this new direction is Jonathan Mildenhall, VP Global Advertising Strategy and Creative Excellence at Coca-Cola.

The videos below are a profound look into the future of digital marketing.  It will not be about the creative twist or angle or brilliant call to action to move you to buy a product.  Soon, to succeed companies must think like inventors willing to invest in the cost of generating great content (blog posts, white papers, eBooks, videos, marketing campaigns).  It’s the willingness for your CEO to create an R&D department in your company just for content creation.  See 70/20/10 below.  Think about Shakespeare’s masterpieces.  They are inventions that came about after a heavy intellectual investment in “R&D like” practices and systems to create those works.  To become relevant in the ever increasing noise of sales pitches and reused copy online, companies who adopt Coke’s goal to produce compelling content will succeed.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Future In Coke’s Eyes – Become Dynamic Storytellers

Dynamic storytelling is the process of identifying incremental elements of the brand’s core story and then dispersing those elements systematically/consistently across multiple channels of conversation for purpose of creating a unified brand experience.  Your core story is the essence of what made you, including the ups and downs, the ugly and pretty.  It’s not a sales pitch.  It’s something all your employees can tell easily and is not memorized.  It’s a unifying cry to all and a story new hires want to be part of unless you are a losy brand/company run by a selfish boss who is out to take and not serve.  In that case, don’t read any further.  You are doomed.

5 Types Of Dynamic Storytelling

1. Serial storytelling
2. Multi-faceted storytelling
3. Spreadable storytelling
4. Immersion and discovery storytelling
5. Engagement through storytelling

Keys To Success To Win The Content Wars

1. Behave like a ruthless editor to stop noise from getting through.  Don’t extend conversations on your Facebook page that leave your core brand story.  Let your tribe carry it forward but be focused.  Every day, there is more and more noise online.  Put a “Brita” filter on your content faucet.
2. Build system wide capabilities as in new processes, people, compensation plans, and technology to allow for dynamic storytelling.

Evolution From Content To “Liquid Content”

What is content – Coke holds a higher standard when defining content.  They see it as stories expressed through every possible connection and channel that (1) add value and (2) add significance to people’s lives.  Content is the “matter” or “substance” of brand engagement and conversation.

What is liquid – elements of content that move freely amongst themselves but do not become separate stories.

The 70/20/10 Liquid Content Investment Principle

Pay special attention around 3:30 into the second video and pause and take notes for you to fully understand this principle.  It is a primary key to their vision over the next 10 years.

 70% of your content and investment of time and money – Low risk content

• Should take less than 50% of our time to produce these blog posts, stories, testimonials, campaigns…  This pays the bills and gets the word out.

20% of content – this is where we innovate from what worked from the 70%.  What took hold there we carry forward to this area.

• Engages more deeply with a specific audience
• We should invest 25% of our time and resources here but with higher paid writers and creative types.
• This content still has the ability for broad scale and appeal.

10% of content – brand new ideas. Becomes next year’s 70% and 20%.  This is high risk – this goes viral over night or fails as quickly.  This is where you spend your R&D budget in content.  The invention of great content is just that, an invention of something new to the world that you develop.  You need to be investing in your future stories.  This is where that is done. This is where a lot of A/B testing can happen.

• This should take up 25% of our time and resources.

Paradigm Shifts To Consider

1. Going from design excellence to CONTENT excellence.
2. Move from one-way storytelling to dynamic story telling.
3. You need to produce sharable ideas/stories/concepts that earn a disproportionate share of popular culture (Own a Topic).
4. Constant iterations of your content, not replication of your production content.
5. Stop thinking in 30 second commercial bites and elevator pitches and website home pages.  Think in story and evolving conversations.
6. Don’t stop campaigns too early.  Keep the conversation fueled and going.
7. Pre-testing and approving content before campaigns begin can kill the campaign in this new world of evolving stories on and offline of a brand.
8. Plan your budgets (pad them a bit to be ready) that initiatives will evolve as they are being rolled out and allow for real-time testing during campaign so you can adapt as needed
9. Think in forms of tent poles (quickly setup shop like the Circus city to city) and tent pegs (hold the tent “core story” in place).

WATCH CASE STUDY

— Mark A Carbone, Co-Editor, Case Studies Online

Yer man Tayto’s on top again, Ireland: a crispy case study

image source: Wikipedia

With a name like Sullivan, count on me to kick things off with a case study from the Emerald Isle.

Founded in the 1950s, Tayto (a division of Largo Foods) is a top Irish crisp manufacturer (that’s potato chip to you, mate!) with the lovable Mr. Tayto as brand mascot. A veritable cultural icon, Mr. Tayto has his own autobiography and even made an appearance as a fake candidate in the 2007 Irish elections with a number of write in votes to his credit, no less. Needless to say, after more than 60 years on the market, it was time to spruce up Mr. Tayto’s image. Cue Ray Swan and the good people at McCann Erickson Dublin, Mindshare and Boondoggle, who came together to create a multichannel marketing and PR campaign that made mouths water:

Objectives:

1. Develop a campaign that allows the audience to engage with the brand
2. Make Mr. Tayto relevant again

Results:

1. An increase in sales of nearly 1 million extra packets of Tayto crisps
2. 90 000 hits on Bebo and Facebook
3. Tayto regained the title of Number 1 crisp in Ireland

How did they do it? Check out this entertaining case study video posted by McCann on YouTube, as well as the campaign website and “Mr. Tayto – Guess who’s looking for love?” and “Mr Tayto – Clothes make the man” videos. You can also get campaign partner Mindshare’s take on the Tayto triumph through their own online case study.

For the curious among you, know that Tayto crisps come in the following mouth watering flavours: Cheese & Onion, Salt & Vinegar, Smokey Bacon, Ready Salted, Prawn Cocktail (!), and Tex Mex.

After you’ve … dare I say it …  digested this case of Taytos, have fun watching this stand-up routine by Irish comedian Dara O’Briain and get a bit of a sense of what a cultural phenomenon the Tayto really is on the “udder” side of the pond.

Enjoy!
Michelle

Houlihan’s Restaurants: The Benefits of a Closed Online Community

Houlihan’s Restaurants, a chain that competes with the Appleby’s of the world, has taken a unique approach to marketing themselves online. Eschewing common advice to “go where the eyeballs are,” Houligan’s created a closed online community, letting it promote exclusive invitations to tasting events and other member-only events.

Backed by a 200,000-person email address list, the chain started by identifying its most active customers (those who participated in surveys, RSVPed to offers, etc.)

The chain’s community runs on the private-label Ning service. About 15 to 20 per cent are active members. “We gauge that by hits to the HQ site (when an e-mail is sent asking for feedback, to do a survey, etc),” Houligan’s digital marketing manager said.

The Chicago-Tribune’s Hyper-Local Future

Used to be, newspapers wanted to the one place people would go to see all the news — whether from your part of town to the other side of the world. But, in a world with 24/7 TV news, should newspapers continue to put its resources toward being all things to all people?

The Chicago Tribune is trying to counter that approach. It now offers readers 87 different hyper-localized editions, representing more than 100 communities in Chicago’s suburbs. Most of the content comes from readers themselves. This Triblocal.com project operates separately from the main newspaper. Revenue is generated from “reverse publishing” content from the web into 21 weekly newspapers that serve clusters of communities, each of which have its own web site.

The project experienced rapid growth in 2009, adding 11 newspapers from January to Oct. 1 of last year.

Read tthe full case study, including stats on monthly traffic and community members.

Carnival Cruise Lines Uses Social Media To Promote Sales

Carnival Cruise Lines thinks it’s pioneered the use of social media to build customer loyalty and satisfaction. Its campaign included launching a blog, a Twitter stream, Flickr photostreams, and a web site offering a virtual interactive tour, an online community/ social network offering photo/ story sharing, scrapblogging, trip planning, event organizing. The target audience was travel agents and new as well as existing customers. The results — more than one million hits on the web site and more than 20,000 online bookings Case Study

Novartis Turns To Social Media To Generate Awareness On CML Disease

Novartis decided to adopt social media to generate awareness on CML Disease and launched a community site known as CML Earth. The site targets CML patients, health-care professionals, and patient groups. The site lets members connect with others near them. The results: More than 2,000 members, an unmatched resource for information on CML and a very active community willing to help CML patients anywhere in the world. Case Study