1. Digital Class: Cultural Branding, Build the Brands Future in the Digital
World
——Mariano A. Bosaz, Global Digital Sr. Director, Coca Cola
Speaking of building brands, we should ask ourselves a question first as
we are now living in the age of digital: whether digital marketing is a new
opportunity or we just execute the marketing strategies in digital world?
Is it digital marketing or marketing in the digitalized world? We have
advertising agencies specialized in digital marketing, if you see the
question from a different perspective, you will capture a different
opportunity. If you only regard digital marketing as one of the marketing
methods instead of treating it as marketing in the digitalized world, the

2. opportunities you perceived would be different. Therefore, the
approaches you’d adopt to build the brands and the results you get will
be completely different. The world today is already highly digitalized, so,
I would like to share 8 pillars of brand-building in the digital era.
Let’s take a look at the first pillar. We usually treat online and offline
differently. However, we find that they are not so different to the
consumers. For example, up to 94% of people always skip the
commercial adverts before the videos if they can, which means people
won’t choose to watch adverts on purpose, only to watch them if they
have to. Another example would also strike a chord in China is that the
cost of a 30-second US Super Bowl commercial is 4.5 million dollars
which is a huge investment. My view is that it is not necessary to invest
so much simply for a 30-second advert and we even cannot guarantee
the consumers will like it. It is quite risky in nowadays digital world. Audi
took the risk this year and wanted to reach more consumers via the super
bowl commercial. Unfortunately, what the consumers felt is not exactly
what the company want. Why did Audi super bowl advert fail? I think it is
wise to try out online first to collect some feedback instead of investing
in expensive media directly since it makes no difference to consumers
whether the adverts come from online or offline.

3. Then let’s move to the second pillar. People are becoming less
focused. According to a research of an Australian university, the average
focusing time of consumers has dropped form 12 seconds to 8 seconds.
People’s time of attention is shorter than that of gold fishes. But 8
seconds still can achieve your goals. BMW used 5 seconds to deliver their
content. The following commercial is made by Coca Cola, let’s watch it.
(Video)
In this example, McDonalds mentioned us because we were its business
partner. But it did not talk about McDonalds, but to guide people to find
out using search feature. It used online free tools to pay on click so that it
provided a different way to advertise. The insight here is making people
to actively search via cellphone while watching TV passively. This is very
smart and successful.
The third pillar is interaction. What do we talk about interaction? How do
we measure it？ Normally, we have TRP，contact rate and impressions for
the interaction of video commercials, how many viewers has the video
reached and how many responses. They are the understanding from the

4. past. But in today’s digital world, the interaction won’t necessarily
have to happen in 30-second advert. It also could happen in consumers’
experience. Let’s see how Tesla electric cars conduct the interaction.
(Video)
What does the video show? Tesla invite consumers to trial drive.
The fourth pillar is that the individual commercials are transforming to
sustainable marketing. You cannot force the consumers to watch a
commercial like we mentioned before. A lot of people just skip the ads.
Instead, we have to build a kind of content, which consumers are willing
to comment, share and repost. How to find the content that consumers
like? Some brands are quite good at it, like GoPro. Their adverts are
appealing to consumers and they are sustainable. GoPro invite
consumers to use the products and share their feelings and in this way
they can promote the products. This is a communication method of
sustainable marketing and a different way of building brands.
The fifth pillar is the process of digitalization. The process in the Beta age
is different from former ones. Traditionally, if a company wants to build

5. brands, they should have a brief for the commercial introducing their
business challenges, target consumers and their insights. Then go to find
an advertising agency with the brief. The advertising agency come up
with some ideas and turn the ideas to scripts. Then the ad firm will tell
the story in different forms, for instance, videos. Then we choose the best
vision of the videos and this will be the TV ad version. It may be perfect
or maybe not, anyway, you put it in front of the consumers. And this is
the old process.
How about today’s process? If you want a meaningful product, you
have to upgrade it constantly according to consumers’ feedback. You
can better the product with the consumers ’comments. I have an
interesting example which is our cherry-flavor cola. Hope you can enjoy
it.
(Video)
What’s interesting about the commercials is that they are created by
consumers. They are generated by users and we release them directly
and make it a Coca Cola commercial. It is not perfect but involves many
consumers to interact with us and shows many ideas.

6. The sixth pillar is related to the old tool we used to measure marketing.
We used a campaign to measure the insights and knowledge of the
company. What’s important is that you have to give up old tools and
learn and adopt new tools.
We have to treat the data as our income. The online platforms are now
asking for authorization to use your account or your camera. They
actually are making money using your information. Therefore, we must
regard the information and data as the source of income.
Then let’s talk about the seventh pillar, digitalization is not poisoning. It
actually represents the world we are living in. Some companies set up a
separate department of digitalization to drive the digitalization of the
whole company. However, this is a temporary action. What’s more
important is that the CEO, CMO and CTO should all be responsible for
the transformation instead of relying on just one department to do it.
The last pillar is about speed. Fast-growing companies will beat down the
slow-growing ones. One way is to act faster than the fastest company.
Here’s an example of a chewing gum company. They launched a new

7. flavor and the taste changed during the chewing. That’s because the
consumers wanted to experience more flavors, so the company reacted
to the request. Another way is to stay focused. Focus on a specific field
and be the most fast-growing company in this field. One more video, this
company sells male shavers and competes with Gillette.
(Video)
They save time in order to save money, which makes them successful.
Even though, the company is small but it’s growing fast.
I would like to recommend a book named The Fourth Industrial
Revolution, written by Doctor Klaus Schwab. It talks about some ongoing
interesting things and the things will happen in next 10 years. Now the
economic scale of APPs is larger than that of computers and movie
industry. A famous person once put it well: the children born today may
change 7 jobs in their lifetime, but 5 do not exist yet.