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Marketing and Sponsorship

Coke’s new sports chief: ‘I’m looking at things afresh’

Coca-Cola’s Ivan Pollard played college soccer in England and even coached for a bit, so why does he call himself the village idiot when it comes to marketing college athletics?

“It’s hilarious, to me, watching college sports in America,” Pollard said with a smile after experiencing his first Final Four in Indianapolis last week. “There were 72,000 people there. The most we ever had at one of our games was 11. Not 11,000, but 11. And somebody brought their dog as well.”

Racquel Mason and Ivan Pollard oversaw Coke’s activation at the Final Four in Indianapolis.
Photo by: COCA-COLA
These days, the two questions most associated with Coca-Cola’s sports marketing are: “Who is this guy, Ivan Pollard?” and “What are they doing?” They go neatly together because Pollard largely will be responsible for shaping Coke’s sponsorship strategy in the coming years. He’s in the midst of a full evaluation of everything Coke does in sports marketing right now.

“I don’t carry any preconceived notion about what works and what doesn’t work, whether it’s basketball, the Super Bowl or NASCAR,” Pollard said. “I don’t have the history. I’m looking at things afresh.”

Pollard, an Englishman quick with a funny line, is equal parts self-deprecating and fiery intense. One minute he’s making jokes about his height — he’s 5 feet 6 inches tall — the next he’s explaining his infatuation with running. He’s completed 20 marathons and two Ironman triathlons.

“We don’t stop running because we get old; we get old because we stop running,” Pollard said, quoting a favorite line from Christopher McDougall’s bestseller “Born to Run.”

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Pollard wasn’t making a connection to Coke’s sports marketing, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to draw that conclusion. In a one-hour interview at the Conrad Hotel in Indianapolis last week, Pollard stressed at least four times the need to innovate or risk falling behind.

“We’re almost 130 years old as a company,” he said. “You don’t get to be 130 years old by just doing what you did yesterday.”

Pollard spent more than 25 years on the agency side before joining Coca-Cola in 2011. He described his job as “globally changing our philosophy about how we spend money.” A year ago, the 53-year-old was asked to relocate from London to Coke’s Atlanta headquarters, where he has been a central figure in the restructuring of the company’s sports marketing amid heavy cuts. The company, plagued by plummeting sales, is in the process of eliminating 1,600 to 1,800 jobs around the world.

Coke’s new “drinkable” ad campaign featured extensions around Indianapolis.
Photo by: MICHAEL SMITH / STAFF
Now, Pollard is senior vice president for connections, investment and assets. The cumbersome title not withstanding, it means that the buck stops with him when it comes to the day-to-day of Coke’s sports marketing, including a corporate champion deal with the NCAA that costs close to $30 million a year.

The official line from Coca-Cola is that roles are still being defined, but it’s Pollard on the front lines at big events like the Final Four, meeting with the NCAA and working closely with Coke’s agencies to plot a course for the future. As he rethinks how Coke uses its many sponsorship platforms, Pollard admittedly is still finding his footing with U.S.-based college sports and the crowds they draw.

“I mean, 72,000, that’s more than watched Arsenal vs. Liverpool,” Pollard said. “That’s remarkable. A college football game will sell as many tickets as Barcelona vs. Real Madrid. … So here I come, the idiot asking the questions.”

Pollard believes he was put in this position because he doesn’t have a firm grasp on American sports. Returning to his self-deprecating mode, he says he willingly plays the role of village idiot, asking the obvious and sometimes not-so-obvious questions.

But his colleagues, like vice president Racquel Mason, who oversees the Coke and Coke Zero brands, think of him as the crazy-like-a-fox type. Together, Pollard and Mason, who attended just her second Final Four, oversaw Coke’s on-site activation in Indianapolis and the launch of a new “drinkable” advertising campaign created by Ogilvy & Mather for the Coke Zero brand.

On the slow, traffic-riddled ride back to the hotel from Lucas Oil Stadium after the semifinals, Mason sat with a notepad in her lap as she and Pollard replayed the evening.

“What would we do differently, what would we change?” Mason said.

Added Pollard: “If you do the same thing over and over, you will fail.”

Pollard’s keen desire to reinvent was what drew him to Coke’s new “drinkable” ad campaign, which launched during the Final Four with 30-second spots on TV and several extensions around Indy. With the help of music app Shazam, users could pour a virtual Coke Zero into a glass on their smartphone. A coupon redeemable at Target, Circle K or a nearby vending machine then appeared on the user’s screen. The idea was to use cool, new technology as a means of inducing consumers to try Coke Zero.

Whether a Coke Zero was pouring on TV, a billboard, the video board at Lucas Oil Stadium or a mall kiosk in Indianapolis, the soft drink’s presence around town was unmistakable. Pollard and Mason themselves went into the mall and watched as people used the app to get their free Coke Zero.

“Anybody who’s any good at marketing never turns off,” he said.

The drinkable TV ads prompted traffic to CokeZero.com, where users were instructed how to use the Shazam app and receive coupons. Shazam told Coke that it registered 166,000 hits from three Final Four TV spots, with 24,000 coupons redeemed, a 15 percent conversion rate. Coke said it considers 3 percent to be standard.

For the tech-savvy Pollard, the new campaign was just the right mix of a unique fan engagement on an existing sponsorship platform. It very well could be the future of Coke’s sports marketing.

“Drinkable advertising will be global,” Pollard said. “Hopefully, we’ll see it pop up in Bangkok and Birmingham and any other places that start with a B.”

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