Creating a Brand OS

For every brand ad on national media, Coke had hundreds of regional "partner promotions" with sports teams, retailers and arts institutions, each of whom created their own marketing assets from scratch — each with a different agency and approved by different clients. Needless to say, this was diluting their brand. My team created an organized approach to partner marketing that kept Coke branding front and center while still leaving room for messaging tailored to each partner.

At the time, Coke was cycling back to a focus on “The Liquid” as their main brand attribute. So we created templated spots with room for partners to add their own messaging. This one could be tagged by specific retailers.

We created a set of about 25 “blanks” to go with the video — concepts tied to a holiday but customizeable by bottlers and their sponsor partners for promotions.

July 4th retail promotion.

This ran during the summer, and was taggable by retailers for various promos and festivals.

More summer work. Busiest time of the year for soft drink marketing.

This was a generic “congrats” ad that bottlers would use in playbills, programs, industry events and the like.

Summer means baseball, a natural tie-in for the brand. These ran on jumbotrons in stadiums all over the country.

Along with the jumbotron video above, this ad would appear in the program for each game.

Here’s one for music festivals and concerts. All told there were over 60 individual executions in this system. We created a library for every kind of event, holiday and use case we could think of. As well as some generic templates for anything we couldn’t predict.