Coca-Cola Music aims to become “established music brand”
Coca-Cola aims to make its music marketing platform an “established music brand” in its own right, pitching it against companies such as iTunes and MySpace.
The music programme – which forms a part of Coca-Cola’s overall marketing strategy – will target teenagers, through collaborations with artists, record labels and technology companies, as it looks to double the entire company’s revenue to more than $200bn (£122bn) by 2020.
The music marketing platform launched in March this year, with a “24 hour session” with Maroon 5, that saw the Australian brand create a track in one day with crowdsourced help from its fans.
Joe Belliotti, director of global entertainment marketing at The Coca-Cola Company, says his personal ambition is to make Coca-Cola Music “as powerful a proposition” as its partnerships with Fifa and its sponsorship of the Olympics.
“Our ambition is to create campaigns that transcend popular culture. I think consumers already associate music with Coke because of our history – the hilltop [“I’d like to teach the world to sing”] campaign and our links with artists like Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles,” he adds.
Bellioti says 2013 will be the “key year” for establishing the Coca-Cola music brand among teens, continuing its music presence from its upcoming multiplatform 2012 Olympics campaign, which he says is the “most exciting thing [he has] ever been involved in”.
Coca-Cola plans to involve more emerging and independent artists in its strategy and has appointed licensing company Music Dealers to help source music for its upcoming campaigns. It is hoped that Coca-Cola Music will be as reknowned for breaking new acts as brands such as MySpace and YouTube.
Coca-Cola Music also signed a partnership deal with Universal, to allow the drinks brand to feature the record label’s artists in its marketing campaigns.
