Scott McCune has worked on 10 Olympics during his time as a marketing executive with Coca-Cola. Sochi is his last with the company. The VP of global partnerships and experiential marketing is leaving Coke to start his own business, McCune Sports & Entertainment. He sat down with SBJ’s Tripp Mickle at USA House to talk about his memories of working on the Olympics during his 16 years with Coca-Cola.
Q: What is your fondest Olympic memory?
Scott McCune: It is when we took the Olympic flame around the world and were in Capetown, South Africa, in a shanty town. I have a picture of a young South African kid, barefoot, torn shirt and shorts, running with the torch with a huge smile. It symbolized not only the Olympic movement but also Coca-Cola. Here was a shanty town, and Coca-Cola brought the Olympic flame to them and the whole town lit up with huge smiles.
Q: What’s the hardest thing about preparing for an Olympics from a marketing perspective?
McCune: From a marketing perspective, one of the challenges is from a global perspective coming up with a core idea and story that’s relevant not just in the host country but also around the world, if you really want to scale, build it once and use it multiple times. Continually coming up with new ideas to bring the brand to life. For example, the torch relay. How do you continue to evolve that? In London, we put the music behind it. In Sochi, we emphasized active living.
Q: What’s the biggest challenge operationally?
McCune: Coca-Cola has a very good system in place. It carries learnings forward from one Olympics to the next. For example, our Coca-Cola team from Korea, which hosts the 2018 Olympics, is here on the ground with a future Olympic host program. They come to a three-month-out review with our Sochi team. They come and observe the Olympics. Then they will come to an after-action review where we weed out what worked, what didn’t work and what we can do next. That helps, especially when you have to service 40 different venues, the Athletes’ Village and all the other challenging logistics.
Q: What Olympics has been the most impactful for Coke’s business?
McCune: Three come to mind. China and the Beijing Olympics because of what it allowed us to do in the country. London, where we had 115 countries take a global campaign and activate it, was satisfying. Then, quite frankly, Sochi, from a Russian business standpoint, has allowed us to take leadership.
Q: What do new sponsors have the hardest time understanding when they come into the Olympics?
McCune: The complexity of the Olympic movement. It’s not just the IOC, the organizing committees, the national Olympic committees, the federations. Sometimes that’s a surprise. Perhaps we sponsors don’t fully understand the power of leveraging the Olympics beyond a marketing platform. It can be a platform to do a lot of things for your business beyond marketing.
Q: All Olympics are difficult. What sticks out in your mind as a difficult Olympic moment?
McCune: In Nagano, during the Olympic torch relay. We used Georgia O’Keeffe. It’s a big brand in Japan. It was the first time we’d never used brand Coke on the torch. Our CMO Sergio (Zyman) was coming to see the torch. The drop-off point was an athlete club. Coca-Cola Japan, they roll out the red carpet. I’m in a car with the activation guy (with Coca-Cola Japan), Takeo Masaoka, and we drive up and there’s a Pepsi truck parked there delivering product. Masaoka went white. We go inside and we talk to the Pepsi guys loading product. Masaoka gets in the Pepsi truck and drives it around the back. Sergio shows up and it’s gone. That’s a memory I will never forget.
