Kumar's Blog

There are thousands of ways to explain how Coca Cola makes you feel, and one way to describe them: AHH!

Visit the umbrella website of this new campaign to see what it is all about. This website is on the domain 'Ahh'. And for each 'h' you add in the domain, you'll see a different creative waiting for you. There are 61 such pages, with everything from GIFs to games that all revolve around (you guessed it) Coca Cola. Apart from these, the site also asks users to submit their 'Ahhhh' idea so that it can be added to the campaign.

This campaign is being targeted at teenagers. All the pages are better viewed on a mobile device in my opinion. Credit to Coca Cola for making the user experience entertaining. When content marketing is turning cliche, here is Coca Cola bringing a whole new perspective to content, with this campaign.

While there has been a lot of talk about brands providing valuable content at regular intervals to its followers, Coca Cola has brought a new twist to it. With this campaign, Coca Cola is banking on its creative capabilities rather than context or any other attribute that lies outside the realm of the brand. Coca Cola is not looking to appear next to seemingly relevant posts, search results or tweets. It is looking to draw users to its site instead, voluntarily.

Just like the Oreo tweet during the Super Bowl, this is not at all easy to replicate. It is easy enough to replicate the campaign, but not the impact, as hordes of brands have realised after failing to replicate the Oreo tweet.

I think Coca Cola has done something really innovative here, and the campaign holds a lot of promise. I have not seen all the 'Ahhhh's yet, but I liked the ones that I've seen so far. Another thing I liked about the 'Ahhh' pages is the simple (but elegant) design. They know what they want the customers to see and they've ensured there's nothing other than that.

The campaign gets a big thumbs up from me. What do you think?

Oreo pulled a wonderful stunt at the superbowl when, unexpectedly, the power went out. There was a tweet from its official account "You can still dunk in the dark". This has been the star example used by everyone who has had anything to say about real-time marketing. This has received so much good press that nearly every brand has tried to pull something similar. Hardly anyone has been successful in doing so.

Oreo was successful in what it did because it was something new. The tweet was as unplanned as the power outage at the superbowl was. Since then, a host of brands have tried replicating the action at various other popular events. Its as though each brand has commissioned its own news coverage team in the garb of real-time marketing. Hardly any of their efforts remotely reflect what the brand stands for. Its as though every brand is trying to be Ramesh Srivats. In fact, the efforts have been so pathetic that they have resulted in a new website. Check out Real Time Marketing Sucks.

Real-time Marketing is not about having something funny to say (most of the times what is said is not even funny) at every popular event. Real-time Marketing is the art of delivering an engaging piece of communication that comes as a surprise. The key element here is the surprise. This is where Oreo succeeded and this is where all those others failed. Once the audience expects some brand or the other to put out a tweet about an event that's happening, the brands will have to be able to surprise and delight in other ways.

That is why you never do real-time marketing. It only happens inadvertently. You just give your marketing a little more autonomy and make it clear that they're not expected to deliver an expected number of real-time marketing messages in a given week or a month.

When Morpheus says in The Matrix "If you ask, you're not ready to know", he might as well have been talking about real-time marketing. If you're asking your marketing team to deliver on the real-time marketing front, you're simply not ready for real-time marketing. That is not how it works.

It is better to stop fussing about real-time marketing and to focus those energies on the traditional marketing efforts instead. Real-time marketing is meant to happen inadvertently and it will happen if you have creative people in your marketing team who have enough autonomy to take calls on what communication goes out when.