Fun article on Coca-Cola’s new direction under new CMO, Joe Tripodi on Ad Age
The most obvious piece the article highlights is that the focus of their MarCom efforts is shifting back to In-Store and “sales oriented” tactics as opposed to the highline “Brand”, “lifestyle” and Star power based tactics of the past.
This is good news for Digital Signage because the retail space is still a little cluttered and companies that refocus their efforts in this space are looking for new ways to use past success in-store. We’ve all heard the reports of “lift” that can be actuated through Digital Signage and we, as an industry, might be able to help out on a mass scale in this regard. Our medium can provide that “channel” (not TV 
) to help execute on that premise. It’s also good news because it will likely refocus big traditional dollars in to our environments that have been earmarked for measured media in the past. How those dollars get used is altogether another question.
What I found fascinating is the “herd mentality” that happens in the MarCom space sometimes. Coke just realigned ALL of their advertising and retail businesses under Joe. This is the first time in many many years that the two areas have reported up into one P&L channel. Critics say that this may make the advertising spend that Coke does much more accountable to itself and much more consumer friendly.
Mr. Tripodi, on the other hand, recently criticized marketers who seek to dazzle without goosing sales or building recall. “We have been seduced by the clever and the cute, the image without the substance,” he said in a recent speech at an Association of National Advertisers event. “We are more concerned with production value than consumer value.”
If you’ll remember from a post I did a while ago, P&G recently made the same switch, aligning their retail/PoP channels under their Brand/Marketing Managers, effectively opening up a new advertising distribution channel and switching an additional $2 Billion into those efforts. (See: P&G Weighs In…The Coming of age for retail media) You can bet that this could be the start of a very big migration of spend when two of the “Classics” move this heavily into this form of strategy.
There was a great quote from Michael Bellas in the article on the movement towards the in-store medium:
At a time when reaching consumers through traditional media has become tougher, talking to them at the store or a restaurant, when they are deciding which product to buy, is critical. Point-of-purchase promotion “will become increasingly important, whether you are shopping” or out at a club, said Michael Bellas of Beverage Marketing Corp., a beverage-industry consultant
Until recently the beverage giant, which spent $741 million in U.S. measured media in 2006, was perceived as ailing on the marketing front, with weak ads, too many changes in agency and strategy, and a product portfolio too narrow for today’s fragmented beverage aisle.
Should be interesting to see which company steps into this strategy next…
digital-signage