The Tokyo 2020 Olympics might be two years away, but Coca-Cola is "already making a marketing play," according to Ilyse Liffreing of DIGIDAY. On Wednesday, the brand announced a collaboration with Adobe for a new crowdsourcing campaign called "Coke x Adobe x You," in which Coca-Cola is "calling for designers to create their own Olympic-themed designs using its brand images and Adobe’s suite of design apps." It is the first time Coca-Cola, which is a founding partner of the Special Olympics, has asked the "global community to capture the identity" of the Games, according to Coca-Cola VP of Design James Sommerville. He said, "We are really trying to disrupt our own process. The way we are seeing Toyko 2020 is that this really doesn’t need to go to a single agency. The spirit of the Olympic Games is to celebrate global achievement. We want to take those same values and celebrate the global design community." To start things off, Coca-Cola had 15 artists from around the world contribute their own designs, "which appear on the Coke x Adobe x You website and will help promote the campaign on social." Coca-Cola is "planning to bring in agencies," possibly next year, to draw up the ideas from the submissions (DIGIDAY, 10/19).
