‘Still getting started’: Coca-Cola’s candid progress report on its in-house plan

By Seb Joseph

Even the biggest and most lauded advertisers struggle with moving more marketing in-house. Coca-Cola is a case in point: two years into its own in-house plan, and it’s still very much a work in progress.

Not that the business would see that as a bad thing. In many ways, the slow progress is intentional. There are too many nuances — from hidden costs to logistical hurdles to political flashpoints — marketers must be aware of if they’re serious about exerting more control over their advertising. The scores of marketers who saw their in-house plans grind to a halt because they tried to rush through those issues can attest to this.

Naturally, Coca-Cola marketers are keen to avoid the same pitfalls.

To do so, they‘re focused on what incremental gains they can get from having an in-house team, not how transformative it can be from the outset. This way the company’s grasp shouldn’t exceed its grasp, said James Donovan, global audience and addressable media manager at Coca-Cola on stage at the Programmatic Pioneers event in London earlier this week.

COCA-COLA’S RECIPE

Incremental gains > transformation; Efficiency in processes, campaigns, data usage; Pool specialist marketing talent under central function; Streamline relationships with agencies; Recruitment is key.

“We’re still getting started in a lot of ways,” he continued. “We went through a major company restructure in 2020 and part of that process was creating a marketing and media services division.”

This is where specialist marketing and media experts from inside and outside the company are based.

“They do so with the objective of making sure that all our processes, campaigns and our use of data are being done as efficiently as possible. Part of that was about taking ownership and control of that,” said Donovan.

None of this is especially new for an advertiser like Coca-Cola. On the contrary, it’s hard to think of an aspect of marketing, from design to creative to media management, that hasn’t been taken in-house at Coca-Cola over the years. This time, however, the business is trying to pool a lot of its specialist marketing talent together under a central function — one that would allow it to realize the operational and strategic benefits of having direct access to that knowledge.

“We as a company are not in-housing in a way that many people would expect in so far as it’s not us taking everything in-house, lock, stock and barrel,” said Donovan.

The subtext behind these words is that Coca-Cola is trying to be tactful around the in-house topic. Time and again, it gets framed as net loss for agencies when it has been proven to be anything but. The reality is that many advertisers continue to use agencies after they’ve replaced them with their own teams.

Coca-Cola is no different. It has a hybrid approach for all intents and purposes. Or, to put it another way, those agencies effectively become a consigliere of sorts to those marketers in the in-house team.

“I sit in a team with over 10 other …read more

Source:: Digiday