#goafest2012

[darwinised]

Spreading Happiness, every single day.

An extension of Goafest Diaries II, here's Coke's content strategy, explained through a video.

Must see! For the next part, click here.

[darwinised]

Spreading Happiness, every single day.

Goafest Diaries (Part II)  Jonathan Mildenhall, VP, Global Advertising Strategy and Creative Excellence, Coca-Cola

For me the ‘big’ point of this talk was:

Its time to move from creative excellence to content excellence.

Content marketing has arrived.

For more than 100 years, Coca-Cola has been one of the world’s foremost practitioners of what they call “one-way storytelling.” But Coke is looking around and realizing that the 30-second television ad won’t take them where they want to go next. To do that, they’re turning to a tool called content marketing, a more dynamic way of connecting with consumers.

Through an ambitious plan called Content 2020, Coke is rewiring and re-tooling the way it wants to communicate with people. At the core of this content strategy lies the philosophy of liquid & linked content.

So what is liquid & linked content?

A behemoth like Coca-Cola creates many stories every year. These stories are created by multiple agencies and in multiple formats — a mobile app one day, a viral video another, a really good television ad etc.

These stories are like molecules in a glass of Coke. Each molecule is an individual piece of content, but they’re also bound together. There’s unity there, a content strategy that acts like a glass, giving shape to the whole endeavor.

There’s a balance between control where the content is "linked” by a coherent strategy, an amalgam of business, brand and consumer interests; and chaos, creating ideas so contagious that they are “liquid” and wander around the world, being shared and even altered along the way.

Through these contagious ideas, conversations are provoked 365 days a year, ensuring that Coke earns a stake in popular culture. And therefore the move from one-way, campaign led storytelling to dynamic 24/7 content led interaction.

Makes sense? :-)

I remember sitting through the session and thinking that no wonder Coke is so revered, so loved and so admired not just by consumers, but by marketing folks as well. Everything ties up beautifully.

Suddenly the "Open Happiness" communication plank made so much sense. What Coke is really asking itself is:

How can we spread happiness every single day, a bit more than yesterday?

Salute!

Goafest Diaries is a series of posts that focus on key learnings I gleaned from seminars/talks at Goafest 2012, in the hope that you may learn a few interesting things from some of the biggest names in media/advertising. Each talk focuses on one ‘big’ point I picked up, one point that resonated with me.