To celebrate the launch of Coca-Cola’s Christmas Advert, VIPER spoke with Islam ElDessouky, the Global Vice President of Strategy and Content at Coca-Cola. We discussed the brand’s use of AI and Out-of-home marketing, highlighting how the iconic brand incorporates both elements in its campaigns. ElDessouky began his career at Coca-Cola in 2006 and has introduced memorable digital and physical experiences with his innovative marketing strategies.
The launch of Coca-Cola’s Christmas campaign marks the start of the holiday season. How do you keep such an iconic moment so fresh every year, and ensure it appeals to all generations?
That’s a great question to start with. First of all, of course we are blessed and fortunate to work on a brand that is so iconic and has been built on the shoulders of giants. So we just keep building what people before us did so magically, I think it’s a blessing in that regard. Now to go to your question directly, we always say that Coca-Cola has the two T’s; it’s timeless and it has to be timely as well. I think the timeless aspect comes in what the brand stands for, the pillars of the brand that stood against time. So the brand stands for authenticity, for connection, for uplifting the human spirit. These are timeless values and I think Christmas has the same spirit. That’s why the fit between Christmas and Coca-Cola from these values is so unique because Christmas has very similar values that are ingrained in its spirit now; that’s the timeless aspect. I always go on Reddit and Discord and try to see what people say, because these are the communities where people really go raw and they talk more subjectively, which is good. You see a lot of people say that Christmas does not start without seeing the Coca-Cola truck. Christmas does not start without us seeing Santa on the pack, stuff like that, which is great. That’s a massive blessing but that is timeless, if we just put the truck on the can every year, that’s what’s expected. The aspect of how to make it fresh? It’s human centricity, we try to see how all our consumers are consuming these big moments today. Is it experience? Is it tech? Is it multiscreen? I think the timely aspect is how do we make sure that we get it closer to the fingertips? Because that’s what everyone is now, everybody is using their fingertips to check. When I want to go and cop this beautiful VIPER poster of Ayra Starr, I have to use my thumbs aggressively to be able to get it, so the thumbs’ tapping power is what we need to think of from a timely perspective. Last year we started Beautiful Journeys, this year we’re doing even more, whether it’s the digital expertise that we’re doing with AI and personalisation or in real life. Especially after Covid, it’s on steroids; people want real life experiences right? We did some stuff last year, this year we’re doing massive truck tours with drone shows; it’s really nice. It sounds simple, but simplicity sometimes is the hardest thing to do. We’re not complicating the discussion, we’re trying to navigate it in a way where we have a role to play and move away from notions of, we need to own Christmas. Nobody owns anything, no brand, no entity, no celebrity, no one owns anything in today’s world. But we want to have a meaningful, playful, engaging role in it to celebrate it.
We’ve seen the first ever AI Christmas Coca-Cola advert today, AI often gets criticised for being not human enough. But when you look at what you’ve created, it just shows the way intelligence can be used to bring that human connection together. How did you bring that into your work within Coca-Cola? And how do you see that it can be used in a human way instead of being robotic technology?
Just like a lot of other technologies and tools and vehicles, it’s an unlock. When you look at it this way, it changes your mindset from fear to actually looking at possibilities and opportunities like when we reinterpret and recreate an iconic moment, which is: Holidays Are Coming. The AI did this beautifully, it doesn’t substitute, it doesn’t replace it should always add, it should always increment. So the unlock is basically how we look at it, like Digital Experience; we want to personalise on steroids. People now know how to use prompts and ChatGPT and whatnot. So we’re just banking on this new trend of people trying to get access and democratise creativity more and more. So sincerely, I see it as a beautiful unlock. If it doesn’t unlock a possibility, don’t do it. Nobody’s forced to do anything right? It’s as simple as that.
With 18 years working with Coca Cola’s communications, what’s changed in those times and how do you keep your approach to the Christmas campaign so refreshing and exciting?
Personally, I can talk about it later because my mum’s family are Coptic Orthodox and they celebrate Christmas on the 7th of January. I always had the blessing of celebrating the 25th [of December] and 7th [of January]. So I get two Christmases, not one. Christmas for me, you think of everybody and how happy they are. For me it’s a double down on happiness, because I used to celebrate it twice growing up in France and celebrating the 25th, and then the 7th too when my mum’s family would celebrate it. But to answer your question, I think what’s beautiful about the Coca-Cola company is its ability to always transform an unknown and learn; I think that is so refreshing. To answer your very clever question, that keeps you always feeling that feeling that keeps the child in you very curious all the time. Because again, with Holidays Are Coming, it’s an ad from the 90’s, right? So it’s 30 years old, if not more. When we think, how do we recreate this or how do we unlock this? We have to unlearn the tradition and learn that AI is perfect. But as humanity, there is nothing perfect in today’s world. This passion and this push that we want to really transform, we want to try new things. We have this principle of 70/20/10, you do 70% of what works, 20% of what’s working for others, and 10% new stuff to see. If it fails, it’s only 10%; it’s okay. It keeps us always on our toes of what’s new. It became an expectation because we’re a brand that is almost 140 years old so it’s almost a century and a half of marketing, of branding, of magic, of reinventing. So that aspect of transforming, unlearning, curiosity, asking, trying and experimenting is so good to be in. Anybody who’s at Coca-Cola would find it even harder to go to other places because of what it offers; there’s no place like that. The brand is absolutely iconic and fun and relatable, and everything that we do is absolutely priceless in terms of the access that we get, the experiments that we go through, and also the reactions that we receive from people who love the brand and don’t wait for us to act on it. So we take responsibility but it’s fun.
Millennials don’t even respond to traditional advertising because we’ve grown up with it but then you’re dealing with Gen Z, who are even smarter than that. How have you changed your approaches within digital marketing alone?
When you discover design thinking, you really push yourself to remove your subjectivity and your ego, because anybody who’s in the creative sphere has a bit of ego. I’m a global VP of Creative Strategy and Content, the word strategy means nothing but an opinion, then you need to get data to make it informed. When you really discover consumer empathy and design thinking and then you get this fraction of them saying, “we love this,” or they share it or they talk about it, sometimes they repeat to us what we cannot say; it’s mind blowing. You said the key word, consumers are really smart; people are very smart the more they grow. I have two Gen Alphas at home, people are talking about what to expect from Gen Z and how to navigate Gen Z but the public announcement I have for everybody is: you have no idea what’s coming your way with Gen Alpha. You have no idea! Prepare for life because Gen Z is a walk in the park compared to what’s coming with this Generation Alpha. That’s not just because Gen Z is the first generation, the Internet is like oxygen and technology, and everything Gen Alpha goes beyond. I am very passionate about Gen Alpha and how they can change the planet ten times over. But to answer your question, it’s really consumer empathy and how you harness it. That keeps you grounded and keeps you really thirsty as a consumer. That’s what I want to please at the end of the day, instead of our egos and our subjectivities. Our culture also drives this beautifully internally, so kudos to everybody that we work with. You can see it, and when you walk out of this room and talk to people from the company, they say the same thing. They talk about the same thing. So that’s what drives the brand, that’s what drives the energy that we put out there. I’m not saying that everything is perfect and everything succeeds, that’s why we experiment. So you try, if it doesn’t work, you try again and then chances are, you’re going to get it right; that’s how progress is. That’s the beauty of a brand like Coca-Cola, there’s a lot of legacy of how it can work. That alone can keep pushing you but it’s not enough, so we always try to really get more.
How successful have campaigns like ‘Playable Billboard’ and ‘Magic Catch’ been in driving consumer engagement, and what metrics do you use to gauge their success?
It’s a great and very tough question because as a medium, it’s one of the hardest to really measure. But what we’ve discovered as a brand is that we’re very much into everyday life. So we like to put up billboards, maps and whatnot so we’re always present, because we want to be in people’s lives. But because Out-of-home advertising became cluttered, it did not progress as a medium at all, people now don’t even pay attention to them. If I tell you, “on your way to the Coca-Cola Christmas in London event, do you remember five Out-of-home adverts that you’ve seen?” You’d scratch your head and be like, “I’m not so sure.” Maybe you’d mention examples from the past that were not even there, so we wanted to experiment. These two examples are experiments where people are out and about, we go to cities and places where people really are in the streets again. Especially after Covid, people have a desire to get out and see life, so how can we engage? How can we intercept them to engage them for a moment and then let them go? It’s not something deep or philosophical, like the meaning of life could be discovered by looking at this Out-of-home, not at all. But we just wanted to tell them, “hey, we’re Coca Cola. We like to connect with people in a very authentic way. Just catch the Coke on the board.” We did this in Romania and Italy and it’s funny when you actually see people really try to catch the Coke and they fail. This human imperfection is so beautiful that it makes you feel, why aren’t we doing more of this? We have this beautiful real estate called Times Square, probably the top landmark in the world together with Piccadilly Circus. New Yorkers are always very fast, on the run, with no connection, very individualistic, so with just a very 80’s style game in Time Square will that stop? You ask, would that actually make you take the time to connect with a stranger to play a game? The question is always, how did it make them feel? Because we say Coca-Cola is a feeling, like the beauty of the brand, not the problem; the problem is sensation. There’s no better beverage in my opinion, I’m a biased person of course. But as a brand, the feelings that it brings to you, you remember that Coca-Cola had a sofa in Times Square asking you and a stranger to play a game for three minutes and just go on with life. That was the whole mechanic that we tried, can we intercept for just a few minutes of your time to create a human connection? Because even on the AI point, to create a human connection for people to connect, bond over something as generic as playing a game; that’s what we did with the Out-of-home. We were trying to see how we can reinvent this medium, because outdoors is the third biggest medium that we invest in after digital and TV. We have Coca-Cola outdoors everywhere in the world, we have a responsibility to reignite this medium and reinvent it to talk to everybody. We use it even in conferences, we want to use it in games and sports events too. Because there’s a screen everywhere; we’re a screen species now, everybody checks a screen in some way or some not.
As a music magazine, music is so important and especially at Christmas. The Holidays Are Coming soundtrack is a classic song and the song by Celeste for the 2024 campaign is a very powerful, emotive song. How do you bring the power of music into the campaign in order to make it more of an experience for your viewers as well?
Absolutely, it’s an important ingredient. When you think of a meal, the meal is not complete without music. Because when we say there’s a feeling, music actually can take the advert and really multiply the feeling. Celeste did this beautifully for us last year. I always say that her voice wraps you and holds you and gives you a big hug while you’re watching the ad. We have something called Sonic Universe, the brand has very clear principles of how we use the sonic experiences in general. Sonic design is absolutely important for the brand because the brand is multi-dimensional, we have to rely on this.
