Coca Cola's new Masterpiece
From a marketing perspective Coca Cola have an interesting, yet hardly unique, challenge.
They're a massive global brand that has been built over decades on classic American ideals, yet their challenge now is to ensure that they don't alienate any person from a vastly divergent set of cultures around the world ,while not diluting the congruence of their brand aesthetic.
For Coca Cola language is a challenge, cultural norms are a challenge and offering a sense of inclusion is an aspiration.
Getting that right is tricky.
In their latest global ad campaign, Masterpiece, they demonstrate how they're solving for all of this.
First, here's the ad:
For the production pundits there is a lot of technical wizardry here to get excited about.
The special effects were created by Electric Theatre Collective based in London - who were also responsible for our favourite 2022 Christmas ad.
The agency tasked to create the campaign - also based in London - Blitzworks is a collective of industry veterans who have been around the block a couple of times and know a thing or two about creating quality advertising.
There's also a South African connection in the ad - South African artist Wonderbuhle created one of the artworks - “YOU CANT CURSE ME” - in the film.
The take out here is that a lot of brands tend to pay lip serve to inclusion and diversity. They know that they should do it - and then what get's produced creatively is quite clearly just a hat tip to DEI, rather than a real belief and commitment to the value of it.
Clearly there is a lot of simply 'going through the motions'.
Coca Cola seem to better understand the value of multiple alternate perspectives; maybe because it makes business sense for them to do so and they've had a lot of practice in doing it.
Overall Coca Cola's Masterpiece ad is a good example of global collaboration done well.
The VFX of it are brilliant, but it's the collaboration of it that really stands out for us.