Coca Cola’s Jonathan Mildenhall, Vice-President, Global Advertising Strategy and Creative Excellence at The Coca-Cola Company, explains the company’s vision and strategy in the new media landscape in a two part video. Here is Part 1:

Brilliantly executed, the videos show what a company with a good deal of advertising and media dollars can aspire to and how they can formulate a comprehensive plan for engaging customers.  But even the rest of us, without those mega media dollars, can adopt some key concepts from this strategy into our own social media interactions.

Here are some key take-aways from Part 1.

• Tell a story that relates to your brand or concept – storytelling engages the reader and helps to develop deeper emotional connections between you (your brand) and your customer
• Encourage dynamic storytelling from customers by engaging in conversations around your stories and the stories of your customers – invite their stories to become a part of yours
• Adopt the “live positively” principle whereby you strive to make each encounter one that has a positive influence – you may not be able to change the world, but you can change the experience of those you interact with

As collaborative and open as the strategy sounds, there is also a great deal of “directing” built into the plan. Should the definition of dynamic storytelling really include the words “systematic” and “coordinated?” Maybe, but customers can and will spontaneously change the direction of the conversation and you need to be able to “go with the flow” without feeling like your grand plan has been hijacked.

Stay tuned for insights from Coca Cola Content 2020 – Part 2.

One attribute of great blogging is the ability to incite a bit of controversy.

A key difference between a blogger and a columnist is that the latter doesn’t traditionally involve reader commentary – at least not in real-time, devoid of editorial filters, and appended for all to see. Blogging proliferated as the first large-scale instance of user-generated content online because self-publication and distribution was suddenly easy and immediate. Three cheers for instant gratification. But the medium is also interactive. Readers can publish just as easily as the blogger.

It is perhaps ironic, then, that the blogger with the largest reported readership, Andrew Sullivan, disabled reader comment capability years ago. Andrew ticks off a lot of blogging boxes, including being something of a provocateur, but without the addition of reader commentary to amplify, deconstruct, cheer and ridicule, I would argue that Andrew is not really a blogger at all. Despite his swagger and self-proclamation as a blogging trailblazer, Andrew is in reality a columnist who publishes at a hyper-blogging pace.

But I digress. The example I wanted to highlight is the great Olivier Blanchard, author of “Social Media R.O.I.” and a prolific blogger in his own right, who yesterday published a post proclaiming “the death of the personal brand” (or at least his fervent hope for its demise). Olivier’s premise is that the recent emergence of a cottage industry devoted to “personal branding,” fueled mainly by the demands of social media, is, in his words, bullshit.

“Don’t be a fake,” he advises. “Drop the personal branding BS. You don’t need it.”

This may not be good advice, but it’s great blogging.

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The original 1947 production of Miracle on 34th Street (the only version worth watching) features the great Thelma Ritter (in her first major motion picture role) in a scene that, amidst all the sentiment in the movie, is often under-appreciated for being the climactic depiction of the actual miracle that occurs on 34th Street:

Major retail brands advising their customers to go elsewhere for the right product to suit their needs.

Did story author Valentine Davies have a premonition of Internet transparency and the consultative power of social media? He might as well have.

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It’s always a delight when technology allows us to do things that elevate marketing beyond the patently commercial. It’s not art, but it can feel like it. At least momentarily.

Two high-profile videos do not a zeitgeist make, so let’s call it a mini-trend. Both current spots take culturally iconic images and animate them – quite successfully, both – to achieve a fresh expression of the deeply familiar. The right combination of fresh and familiar is media gold. When we talk about making emotional connections in marketing communications we are mining the territory of the familiar, tapping into primal triggers located deep within the limbic system of the brain.

Familiar visual and auditory cues – images or music that we’ve made associations with over the course of a lifetime – serve as shortcuts to these triggers. They can be extremely powerful. The high price for licensing such cues is a reflection both of the value of that power and the need for preserving that value through some inscrutable formula of exposure and exclusivity. I dare say that allowing Michael Jackson’s Thriller to be used for Party City advertising was probably not a wise application of this formula.

These two spots succeed in preserving the delicate balance of value in familiar cultural cues, and do it in an entirely captivating way. Good stuff.

Here’s a problem we here at Arch Digitals are working to solve. Can’t say more than that right now, but stay tuned!