The Coca-Cola Company
+Partner Agencies
Brave Dog Assignment:
In 2022, Coca-Cola’s Global Design team wanted help shaping a few boutique agency projects into award winning case studies. Our team led a collaborative effort to blend targeted competitions, award storytelling, and project development into the Design team’s first wins for ADC Global and D&AD Awards. This year’s challenge – bring our collaborative case development approach to four of Coca-Cola’s agency partners – 4x the work, coordinating with 4 separate agency partners.
Coca-Cola’s Global Design Team Challenge:
Coca-Cola’s Global Design Team manages dozens of design agency relationships and projects across the globe every year. The team wants to identify and develop a small fraction of their agency partners projects in order to successfully compete in elite global advertising, design, and marketing competitions each year. The Global Design Team’s role is project advocate and matchmaker, identifying a few projects that have potential to compete for recognition against the world’s best. Coca-Cola operates in a keenly competitive consumer sector – where established rivals and new entrants regularly feature work that wins elite design and advertising awards. Coca-Cola has been an award-winning marketer with iconic campaigns that have earned hall of fame status. One of their many challenges is to sustain this winning heritage as their brands continue to expand into new markets, new mediums, and new expressions.
Potential award projects have to be developed and entered by their agency partners – and many of these cutting edge boutique agencies lack the internal awards departments and prior expertise to optimally navigate award competitions. The Global Design Team’s challenge is two-fold, identify optimal competition opportunities, and accelerate awards development with inexperienced agency partners.
The Award Challange:
The Global Design Team relies on Brave Dog’s deep expertise to identify specific categories and entry positioning. Many of Coca-Cola’s specialized design partners need coaching throughout the entry process – from case story development to materials prep, entry writing, and details of the submission process. Brave Dog’s white label consulting model provides as much entry assistance as each partner needs to field truly competitive entries.
The Solution:
Coca-Cola wanted their partners projects to win recognition within the very largest global creative competitions, against very deep-pocketed rivals. Our team led a collaborative awards story development process – first by benchmarking these projects against prior year winners. The agencies debriefed their projects and answered detailed questions from our strategists. From there, we developed an awards positioning story for each project, and tailored the pitch to specific categories. With competitions, categories, and positioning in hand, Brave Dog’s team worked with the agencies to develop the case video and story boards to best present the projects.
This methodical process of benchmarking, narrative positioning, and case story development paid off with wins in ADC Global and D&AD, the first-ever wins for this relatively new boutique agency.