Coca-Cola Marketing Hopes to Capture Entire Olympic City

(ATR) The layout of Rio de Janeiro has forced Coca-Cola to get creative with the Olympic marketing.

With two Olympic Parks, two other competition zones, and a global marketing strategy aimed at inspiring teenagers the soft drink company decided that the live site in Rio’s port area will be the main activation zone for the 2016 Games.

Marketing Director James Williams told Around the Rings that the port activation is part of the company’s global strategy to be "one-hundred percent on teenagers."

Williams says that the new global Olympic marketing strategy aimed at engaging teenagers was done in consultation with the IOC to reach the next generation of athletes and consumers. In addition to reaching out to young people, Coca-Cola is pushing alternative smaller packaging so consumers have more choices if they want to limit their consumption.

With the Olympics 81 days away Coca-Cola will continue using the Olympic Torch Relay to build marketing momentum ahead of the Games. While Rio de Janeiro does not look like previous Olympic cities, Williams says that the company is right on track with activation efforts and is not behind where they were during previous Games.

In Porto Maravilha, Coca-Cola will use the warehouses along the port to create the "Coke Stop," to interact with the young people of Rio and spread Olympic values.

"One of the reasons we went out of the Park was because there are more people that are gathering down there in the port area that are there normally," Williams said. "We are going to have athletes, we are going to have party nights that involve athletes and our musicians and our influencers, and we are really going to create stuff for young teenagers."

On top of using athletes and influencers, Coca-Cola plans to use real time marketing to bring global engagement with fans during activation events. Williams says they will be linking the Brazilian team with others assembled worldwide for the first time to send as much content from the Games as possible.

With four different competition zones Coca-Cola believes that it offers a chance for more people in the city to be touched by the Olympics. Williams says that the Deodoro Park is one example of having "many people up there that are going to get access to the Games that probably wouldn’t have come down," if all the events were in the Olympic Park.

"It’s a challenge because you have to get more people, where London everything was kind of in one place," Williams said. "It presents problems because you split things and you have to present things where you have to focus your activation, but I think it is only a good thing because it shows so many different parts of Rio."

Williams says that in the Olympic Park the focus will be on Coke products as well as the stories that are crafted during the Torch Relay. At the Olympic live site in Parque Madureira north of the city Coke says they will have another activation zone, although it will be the smallest of the company’s initiatives.

"This is probably the first time we’ve done all of this and hopefully we’ll do it again," Williams said. "I really believe the Games here will be the surprise for Brazil. I think hopefully it will be a real inspiration for the country."

Homepage photo: Getty Images

Written by Aaron Bauer in Rio de Janeiro

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