These Coke Content 2020 videos have been doing the rounds for rounds of in-house emails, twitter links and conversation:
It was this post that finally exhorted me to go and watch them in their entirety. And while not earth shattering, they are significant, both for their content and their source: Coke’s Jonathan Mildenhall.*
It’s still very broadcast; “Brand stories create liquid and linked ideas” starts with the brand story rather than the audience or user interests or needs. Nonetheless the consumer gets wrapped in along the way, its just that the Coke model is about reacting to the audience response once the brand has started the conversation.
And to be fair, Coke is talking about Storytelling, not conversation. So its not surprising that the language is still very much around broadcast modalities; “The development of incremental ideas that get dispersed systematically across multiple channels of conversation for the proposes of creating a unified and coordinated brand experience.” Does that sound a little but like a media plan to anyone else?
Where it gets more interesting for me is in the identification of the skill sets and processes the brand needs to get its head around in order to be a multi-platform, culturally disruptive story teller. Mildenhall identifies 5 skillsets
- Serial story telling
- Multi faceted storytelling
- Spreadable storytelling
- Immersion and discovery storytelling
- Engagement through storytelling
I think this rightly lays down a number of challenges;
1. Really properly integrated: If you think about what this means for the agency model that’s required to support this its either incredibly small, tight and nimble or if its big, it’s hyper-integrated. But it’s certainly not like a lot of what we see around us at the moment where integrated means the image still from the ad shoot is used on the in-store, the bus side and the display banners.
2. Understanding the explicit and implicit consumer voice: Like lots of people at the moment, Mildenhall is very enthusiastic about data (although…’data whisperers’…?) which is the implicit voice of the consumer, and about the literal or explicit voice of the consumer, at minute 6:47, where the consumer is flagged as one of the collaborators who will enable big fat fertile spaces for ideas to be developed.
In video Two ‘Content’ is actually defined as ‘The Creation of Stories that are to be expressed through EVERY possible connection”. To my mind the last three words imply functionality as well as the more reductive view of content as images / text / video. This also sets up challenges for the agency world to be able to assemble a team that can tell a story not without regard for the channels, but rather with the deep knowledge of those channels that enables finesse and élan.
The way that Coke is acheiving this expression is through collaborative, adaptive and continuous models of development. And while we may have heard these kinds of claims before Mildenhall then rolls out the ways they are doing it;
- Working directly with creative talent
- Working with Brand Fans
- New Creative Industry Collaborators (although I’m not quite sure what this means, it clearly doesn’t mean a large WPP /Omnicom agency)
- And a single Rock Star agency
So challenge 3: what’s the non-rock-star agency role in all of this? Booking flights?
Challenge 4 (and possibly the role of the agency redefined as tutor, mentor sensei and guide) is to embrace these 5 principles of co-creation which Milden hall reckons applies to each of the development models;
- Inspire participation amongst the very best
- Connect these creative minds
- Share the results of our efforts
- Continue development
- Measure success
And the same could be said for what he defines as the requirements of managing the development of a Liquid Idea
- Govern its flow: define the North Star: how will this (idea) make a significant impact on popular culture
- Encourage behaviours; Bravery, creativity, play, clear thinking, risk taking
- Incubate creative ideas and create a culture of creativity
- Use conflict constructively
{As a planner, that (optimistically?) sounds to me very much like the combined role of a planer and creative director}.
Finally and this is the bit that got the blogosphere excited, Mildenhall unveiled an investment model; “3:11: Chapter 7; applying the 70 /20 / 10 investment principles”
In the future Coke will invest in content according to this breakdown;
- 70% Low risk content that ‘pays the rent’ and consumes only 50% of time
- 20% innovate off what already works, engaging more deeply with a more specific audience but still with broad scale
- 10% high risk content, brand new ideas that will become tomorrow’s 20 or 70.
Which reminds me of Google’s 80 / 20 rule for driving innovation by allowing engineers to spend 80% other time on something that interests them personally.
The upshot of this is that Coke is no longer relying on agencies to bring them culturally disruptive ideas, they are going out to the bazaar and peering into all kinds of tents. This can only be a good thing for shaking up agencies, but also for rewarding different models of creation and innovation and spreading the investment pot into some less frequented corners of the market place.
*Coke is an Ogilvy client