17 Mar 2023 Coca-Cola’s new Masterpiece ad campaign

Here’s some wonderful, massively entertaining drinks advertising, a new global campaign for Coca-Cola…

From a marketing perspective Coca Cola have an interesting, yet hardly unique, challenge, notes SA marketing/innovation guru Jonathan Cherry.

He writes….

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 its latest global ad campaign, Masterpiece, Coca-Cola demonstrates how they’re solving all of these issues. 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 this wonderful 2022 Christmas ad – click here to view.

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. See more about him here…

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.

Source: CherryFlava.com