How do you make people feel something about a product they've already decided they love? Coca-Cola is the most recognized brand on earth. The work isn't awareness — it's relevance, emotion, and the recurring challenge of keeping a 120-year-old brand interesting to people who already know everything about it.
The grounding at Coca-Cola was in brands that didn't get distribution by default. The first work was the ready-to-drink coffee portfolio — Godiva Belgian Blends and Caribou Coffee — building two premium brands inside a category Starbucks had defined and owned. The discipline wasn't advertising. It was earning shelf space. Every new SKU at Coca-Cola has to win the bottler's operating commitment before it can reach a single store: bottlers have finite truck space, finite cooler doors, finite slotting fees to spend, and they invest in brands they believe will turn. The work was building the brand case, the category case, and the trade case in parallel — enough story to win the consumer, enough math to win the bottler.
The next move was the Citrus business unit and the company's strongest attack on Mountain Dew in decades. Vault was the centerpiece — a hybrid energy-soda built to take Mountain Dew on directly — paired with the rebirth of the classic Mello Yello brand for the long-tail Southern loyalist base Mountain Dew had taken for granted. Same discipline as the coffee work, harder problem: Mountain Dew was a defended fortress with deep retail relationships and decades of brand love inside the Pepsi bottling system. Winning shelf required convincing Coca-Cola bottlers and retailers that the company could compete, at scale, in Pepsi's strongest category — and getting both Vault and Mello Yello onto trucks that already had a full load.
The lesson from both portfolios carried into everything that came next. Brands inside a bottling system don't get distribution by default; they earn it by proving the case to operators whose money is on the line. The core brand work that followed inherited the same instinct: make people feel something so that the system, top to bottom, has a reason to invest.
Coca-Cola had a cultural relevance problem: how do you run entertainment-driven campaigns for the world's most recognized brand without them feeling like wallpaper? The media and activation budget across the core brand portfolio — NASCAR, Olympics, World Cup, Holiday, American Idol — ran to $800 million annually, managed by a team of six brand and associate brand managers. The answer, every time, was specificity: find the one true human moment inside the big cultural event and build the brand there, not around it. Coca-Cola belongs inside the experience, not sponsoring it from the outside. High-stakes brand stewardship at scale, with a lean team that had to be right.
Two examples of the work. The American Idol "Perfect Harmony" campaign was a multi-season branded integration — Coca-Cola woven into the set, storyline, and talent rather than dropped into ad breaks. Taio Cruz was the centerpiece of the Season 10 execution. The Olympics 2012 work included a campaign built around Paralympic gold medalist Jessica Long, at a time when Paralympic storytelling was still rare in mainstream advertising. The spot ran during the London 2012 Games.
The Arctic Home campaign partnered Coca-Cola with the World Wildlife Fund to raise awareness of polar bear habitat loss. The creative vehicle was a limited-edition white Coca-Cola can — replacing the iconic red with white to signal the melting Arctic. It was one of the most visible cause campaigns the brand had ever run, and one of the most debated internally: changing the can color, even temporarily, touched the most sacred element of the brand system.
I helped introduce the white can program. The can is now in the Smithsonian Institution's permanent collection — which is the kind of proof point that no press release can manufacture.
The polar bears from the Arctic Home campaign didn't just live on a can. For Super Bowl XLVI — New England vs. New York — Coca-Cola cast them as football fans, one rooting for each team, and invited America to watch the bears watch the game live. In real time, as the game was played, the bears reacted to every score, every halftime moment, every competitor ad that ran during the broadcast. Multiple TV versions were produced and aired based on how the game was going, synced with the live digital stream. Twitter and Facebook generated over 5,000 comments per minute. Nine million screens. Average viewing time: 28 minutes per screen. Publications ranked it a first — a new category of digital real-time advertising that hadn't existed before the game started. The campaign was submitted to Cannes. Not bad for a webcam from the Arctic.
Running parallel to the American Idol Perfect Harmony campaign and the Arctic Home white can, the Mini Can was the format answer to the same health-and-wellness pressure. By 2010, Coca-Cola hadn't grown US market share in seven years. The category was under pressure from energy drinks, water, and a broad shift away from full-calorie sodas. The brand wasn't broken — but the package was. The standard 12oz can had become the default, and the default was losing consumers who wanted the taste without the full caloric commitment.
The Mini Can — a 7.5oz, 90-calorie format at a premium price point — was the answer. It gave health-conscious consumers a reason to come back to Coke without switching to a diet formulation. Alongside the format launch, I redesigned the grocery merchandising strategy to treat the Mini Can as a premium SKU rather than a discount play — different shelf placement, different display mechanics, different price anchor.
The result was the first US market share growth in seven years. The format created a new consumption occasion — the "occasional treat" — that the full can couldn't serve. It's still on shelves.
McDonald's was Coca-Cola's fastest-growing customer. Asia Pacific was the company's fastest-growing region. I was selected for the international assignment to Shanghai to accelerate both — inside the AMPEA (Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa) division, managing the McDonald's global account at the intersection of those two growth trajectories. The work was part brand, part supply chain, part business development: coordinating promotional programs across markets, managing the commercial terms, and keeping two enormous organizations moving in the same direction on joint campaigns.
The program I managed was the London 2012 Olympic Games collectible glasses series — six limited-edition glasses, each in a different color (Pink, Green, Blue, Aqua, Charcoal, Purple), each embossed with an official Olympic sport pictogram: Gymnastics, Athletics, Swimming, Basketball, Football, Cycling. Available only at McDonald's, only from May through September 2012, across 18 markets: China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Macau, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Pakistan, South Africa, Indonesia, Tahiti, Fiji, New Caledonia, and Singapore. Executing a collectible program with that kind of market footprint requires supply chain, commercial, and brand coordination that doesn't appear in any brand marketing job description — which is exactly what makes it useful.
The other big win on the assignment was winning and supplying the coffee business for the Asia launch of McCafé across 37 countries. McDonald's had decided to compete with Starbucks at scale, and Coca-Cola was not the obvious vendor for the conversation. Securing the business required a company-wide effort: sourcing certified coffee at volume in India, then building a cross-border supply chain with the kind of predictability — in supply and in price — that a global QSR can underwrite a menu launch on. The reason it mattered beyond the coffee category itself: it was what allowed Coca-Cola in Asia to remain the exclusive beverage supplier to McDonald's. That exclusivity is an honor and a competitive advantage the Coca-Cola system holds in this region of the world and does not hold globally.
The McDonald's relationship earned a Global Benchmark Supplier designation for the Coca-Cola division — a recognition that the division had performed at the highest level across the full scope of the commercial relationship, not just the creative work.