Ad:tech New Delhi‘s opening keynote presentation by Wendy Clark, Senior Vice President, Integrated Marketing Communications and Capabilities of The Coca-Cola Company was the first of the all-women keynotes for this edition. It was a highly-awaited presentation on Coca-Cola’s Liquid & Linked marketing strategy.
Wendy Clark began by naming two things that are absolutely imperative for today’s successful leaders – managing the present and inventing the future. Content holds enormous importance in this day and age, and more importantly it has a way of scaling around the world instantaneously. Coca-Cola is present in 207 countries and the potential to spread content is huge.
“Consumers today want to live lives where they are the star. If we give them useful, interesting, share-worthy content, we’re giving them a currency by which they can rate their lives.” – Wendy Clark
The Liquid and Linked content strategy is based on one core insight – stories spread value.
- Stories: Stories comprise of content, experiences and conversations.
- Spread: To spread your stories, use owned, earned, shared and paid media, in that order, with social at the heart. Social will make everything you do bigger.
- Value – They will help in creating value that transcends that of your own company.
Here are the eight takeaways from the presentation:
- Be shareworthy – Everything that is created in the social world needs to have the ability to be shared further. Your initial audience can reach an audience much larger than you have – the ultimate audience. This is why it is so important for all business to get shared further and reach places they cannot on their own.
- Embrace your new sales force – Your customers are your new sales force. They can amplify your message.
- Listen, and then engage - Listening isn’t finished unless you engage. Use what you learn to connect with the customer.
- Think big, start small, scale fast – What you want to do is test, fail, learn and scale. If we do not re-position failure as a positive, we will send up scaling the wrong things perfectly. Do what fits in with your brand strategy.
- Speed trumps perfection – As marketers we try to put up very perfect products, because we’re perfectionists. Real-time marketing requires speed. A poster in Facebook’s office says ‘done is better than perfect’. Be ’flawsome’ – awesome with your flaws.
- Disrupt or be disrupted - The speed of the market requires that we think about what will disrupt us, and then go ahead and do that ourselves. If you’re really going to be a part of brand publishing then be comfortable with the inevitable debates.
- Do not accept the status quo - You cannot stand still. What got you here will not take you forward. Do not accept the ‘no’. Turn the ‘no’ into a ‘yes’.
- Play well – Today campaigns, collaborations and relationships are more complicated than ever before. It is imperative to play well with others, this should be at the heart of everyone’s strategy.
Wendy Clark also shared a number of videos from Coca-Cola’s various global campaigns to reinforce each of her points, including the ‘Hug Me‘ and ‘Open Happiness‘ campaigns, and added that Coca-Cola is very aware that every one has a mobile phone in their hand, and they will leverage mobile as well, to ensure that they become ubiquitous.
The vibrant presentation was followed by questions from the audience. Stay tuned to @IndiaSocial for more updates on Ad:tech New Delhi.