What you need to know

• It could be a very messy Christmas for brands if they don't rethink their planning cycles. Most retail space is already booked out for Christmas 2024. Yet "from a brand perspective, it feels like a last minute rush to get to market," per Coca-Cola ecom chief Mick Drew. "That is a weird journey that we need to align."
• He said brands now also need to be much more responsive during big shopping events like Amazon Prime Day or Alibaba's Singles Day. Which is why Coke has overhauled its in-house performance capability and is bringing creative and media closer together.
• Plus, beautifully crafted customer experiences and award winning creative executions mean nothing if you can't get the merch on the shelves in time.
• Coca-Cola learned this the hard way during a FIFA-Coke Campaign that was still pushing product even when it was out of stock.

Brands, agencies and retailers need to rethink planning cycles – or risk a messy Christmas, according to Mick Drew, ecom chief at Coca-Cola South Pacific. He said brands must also better align fulfilment with media, creative and customer experience before investing big sums in fancy executions, or risk "terrible experiences". Meanwhile, the rise in retail events like Amazon’s Prime Day and Alibaba’s 11.11 requires creative turnaround in as little as an hour – and creative, media and performance teams to work far more closely.

Speaking on a retail media panel at the Programmatic Summit in Sydney last week, Drew referenced a FIFA-Coke brand and merch partnership developed last year for the World Cup. It's perhaps seen as an execution denied a win by a last minute own goal. 

“The biggest learning we took out of that was we have to look at full funnel and full end-to-end. It's not just about reach and consumer experience. If we don't have the ability to fulfil that product with our retailer, we are just sending consumers down a dead end and creating a terrible experience,” per Drew.

“So it was exciting to see a FIFA and a Coke Zero product and program in market. But when you got down to the consumer and towards the end of that program and you see your product out of stock, that hurts,” he added.

“So we can create creative and clever cross-category programs to drive consumer engagement. But if we're not looking at fulfilment, there's no value spending a dollar upfront.”

The problem is hardly unique to Coke. End-to-end orchestration of data and systems is difficult to achieve even when the tools technically allow it. Often they don't (see KFC's frontline battles in the Infamous Chicken Sandwich Wars for a case in point). But Drew thinks getting product into the right places at the right time is pretty fundamental – which means thinking further ahead.

Planning overhaul required

Coca-Cola takes an omnichannel approach to retail media networks – or ‘customer media networks’ as FMCGs call them. “A component of that approach means we can only work as fast as their slowest execution,” said Drew, which means brands, retailers and agencies need to get a more cohesive grip on planning cycles.

“Talking to the Coles team last week in Melbourne, we found out that a thousand case stackers [the cardboard units designed to make product standout within or aisles or near point of sale] can take up to 20 weeks to execute – plus the planning cycle,” said Drew.

“We’re also looking at a scenario where most of the in-store space for Christmas 2024 is pretty much locked-in already. I don't think there's many brands that have got a brand plan for Christmas '24 yet.”

Meanwhile, brand, creative and media buying teams “are not getting any of that content right until the precipice point,” said Drew. “So I think there is a fundamental shift we need to make as a tri-party industry to look at what our planning cycles are.”

He said that realignment needs to happen sooner rather than later.

“If we're literally looking at what high level plans need to be locked in for November, December '24, what does that mean from a brand investment planning perspective? What does that look like from a media buying perspective – and then reverse engineer that back,” said Drew. “Eighty per cent of the plans are done 18-24 months ahead of time, but then from a brand perspective, it feels like a last-minute rush to get to market. That is a weird journey that we need to align."

Trade-marketing mixer

Retail media in the US has pushed trade and marketing teams closer together – and larger FMCG brands locally are starting to make similar shifts.

Coke has already made that move to better align trade spend held by its franchisees, which manufacture, bottle and sell product, and the Coca-Cola company’s central media budget.

“Over the last 12 to 18 months we have been bringing that media budget and trade budget together to look at what is the right investment strategy to get the end game." In Coke language, that is 'weekly plus', said Drew, i.e. week on week comparable sales. "We have to drive weekly plus, and top line growth. If we do that, we get a little more love from the retailer and some lenience to do more things.”

Agency-performance rethink

Bringing trade and marketing assets and investment together has required Coke to bring agencies “closer to us”, said Drew, while necessitating better performance marketing capability – and much faster creative turnaround times.

“If I look at the way we were buying digital retail media activation sets, we had our typical marketing activation managers leading a performance investment – and they were not skilled for that. Very capable, amazing humans, but they weren't experts,” said Drew.

“What we've done in the last 12 months, really gearing ourselves up for 2023, is bring in those performance marketing skill sets [around] paid search, organic search, how do you optimise your digital shelf? How do we get creativity back in? How to bring in the resources for creative to go from a six-week creative cycle to a 24-hour cycle? And if we're talking Prime Day or [Alibaba’s] 11.11, we've got to literally turn creative around in an hour so that we can optimise,” he added.

“So we have had to bring those resources in and build our media agency and creative agency team to cater for that. Which means that I'm spending more money in that space, which means I can put more pressure on retail partners to get a better return on investment,” per Drew.

“From an organisational change [perspective], it doesn't necessarily mean everyone's going out and creating these brand new teams. But you do have to look at the problem, identify the skills needed and bring those resources in together.”

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