“Yoon Ahn, she’s an amazing creator and she’s futuristic—she personally and professionally is really an inspiration to us,” Vlad said. “Working with someone of her talent, it’s important to be comfortable surrendering some of that creative control.”
Embracing risk through the Creations offerings has made Coca-Cola more amenable to designers’ input beyond the campaign. Vlad pointed to recent Coca-Cola collaborations with Highsnobiety on a Zero Sugar line and A Bathing Ape on a throwback collection as evidence of its willingness to let designers take the brand’s legacy marks to a modern audience.
Meanwhile, Careagea said Creations interactions with musical artists have helped the company build out its Coke Studio digital musical platform. That resulted in collaborations with 18 artists from around the world, but also physical experiences at festivals like Belgium’s Tomorrowland and Brazil’s Rock in Rio.
“As we set the path of any other program that we do in the future, we always learn from here,” Careaga said.
Gaining intelligence
Creations also helped Coca-Cola figure out where emerging technology fit into its marketing mix. By using Creations as its test case, it was able to take digital collectibles, augmented reality concerts and events tied to its packaging, and scale them up to other campaigns.
The AI used to create the Y3000 can and associated experience was in development for more than a year, before generative AI became the talk of the globe. The end result was a bit of AI that was accessible to anyone with a smart device.
“We want them to have fun. [But] then we thought that Coke is so democratic … we wanted to create a really simple user experience with AI that everybody could participate in,” Vlad said.
Now, Coca-Cola is able to use some of the AI lessons from that endeavor on AI-generated wish cards for Diwali in India and AI-created Christmas cards at its Create Real Magic platform. Creations started with different takes on Coca-Cola’s core products, but it resulted into a different approach to marketing its entire brand worldwide.
