Events and Reports
What is your broadbrush assessment of Coca-Cola’s success at Rio 2016?
TB: It’s a difficult question to answer at this stage because we don’t have all the results; we are right now gathering all the results and learnings to do a full debrief internally, including with our future countries in Korea and Japan. That will happen in November. I would say that the impressions when you leave Rio are twofold: one is a feeling of incredible excitement among Cariocas in Rio. I’ve seen many of them that were impressed with what’s been delivered versus what they were expecting, especially when they looked at some of the venues, when they looked at what was happening on Olympic Boulevard in Praca Maua, and the incredible enthusiasm there. The Olympic spirit was really evident there, for sure. Our major experiential marketing initiative, Coca-Cola Parada, targeted to teens was based there. Not only were people queuing for hours to experience it but it was also shared through digital and social media to teens across Brazil and the world.
And then of course because it was the first Games in South America, it goes with some of the challenges that you could expect. It’s not like running the Games in a country with a lot of experiences with big events. Even if they had the Fifa World Cup a couple of years before, the Olympics is so much more complex. We faced some operational challenges, especially during the lead-up and during the first week of the Games. So it took a bit of time to make sure the delivery was done properly.
That’s Gold was the name of the Coke campaign around the Games; what are you measuring to ascertain the success of it?
TB: We launched a new Coca-Cola campaign earlier in the year – Taste the Feeling. That’s Gold was more an extension of that global campaign. It was about taking the Olympic context to bring the next layer of Taste the Feeling. We launched That’s Gold in Brazil around the torch relay, while in the other markets we launched closer to the Games. We have different KPIs we measure: brand KPIs we measure all year long, and on top of that we’re adding additional KPIs specific to the campaign, including how we engage with our core target.
Social engagement is now a crucial pillar of any global marketing campaign. Was that your experience in Rio?
TB: For me, the way we do marketing is completely different from one Games to another. The engagement of our consumers is changing drastically. What we did in London was completely different to what we did in Rio, especially around social media and digital engagement. One example would be Coca-Cola Parada, an experiential initiative designed to be socially/digitally shareable. In that space we had a whole team of 50-plus people working on what we call the real-time marketing engagement. They were able to listen to what was happening and also create content in real time, and then share it. We were throwing concerts at night that were captured live on Facebook – definitively a different approach from what we’ve done in the past. We started that real-time capability during the Fifa World Cup because Brazil had developed capability in that space. For Rio 2016, we went to the next level; we tried to increase our social engagement both from a local as well as from a global perspective.
Coca-Cola is an active partner of both the Olympic Torch Relay and the Fifa World Cup Trophy Tour. Clearly there are similarities between the two properties in the way they bring the tournaments into disparate communities. But there is always negative press in the build up to these competitions. Do you think that could negate the positive impact of an association with a pre-tournament property?
TB: The trend of having some negative spin in the lead-up to the Games is not really new. It’s something that could happen when you have a major event, free to access going through your country. You run the risk of having people hijacking the event to promote their cause. We have seen this in the past on the Tour de France as well as sometimes on the Olympic Torch Relay. Having said that, 99% of the time, this magical Olympic flame is receiving an incredibly warm and positive welcome by the local population, as it’s a unique opportunity to celebrate their local heroes. As these are free events, everybody can go and see the flame, the torchbearers, cheer for their heroes, attend the city celebration every night. We’ve been supporting the Olympic torch relay since 1992, and I’ve been in charge since 2004 and I can tell you I’ve seen magic happen anywhere in the world in the same way.
When does your current IOC contract run to and are you in discussions about partnering with the new Olympic Channel?
TB: Our partnership is up to 2020, which includes Tokyo. We said we would do Rio and then have a discussion with the IOC, so that’s where we are. That will also include a discussion around the Olympic Channel. The channel was announced about a year ago; it’s now live. The amount of work that has been done is very impressive. The quality of content is pretty good. We are in discussion with the IOC on the best way to integrate partners. Trying to engage the audience not just during the Games, but all year long is certainly a great ambition. Now we need to define what it means for us and what role we can play.
Events and Reports
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