Coca-Cola Social Media Newsroom 2016

Content Kick’n’Rush

A lot can happen in football – A biting player is just one example. Pretty much as soon as it happens, a creative discussion about the event begins within the Internet community, via the social networks. At the 2016 UEFA European Football Championship Coca-Cola tried to keep pace with this. 

The challenge of real time marketing is to have an immediate reaction to notable football moments and to get the idea out there as quickly as possible. This is because if you are quick to react with a post, you will be celebrated on the Internet and ideally it will create a lot of hype. It is much more difficult for an international brand to participate in this buzz than it is for a private person, as the usual processes of agreement and approval just take too long.

“It's super important to be relevant and present in social media. And everything on social media is going really, really fast. So we need to be on board at the right time, with the right content.”

Matthieu Girard, Senior Brand Manager Coca-Cola

As a solution to this, Coca-Cola heralded in the "Social Media Newsroom" for the very first time at the EURO 2016, so that European representatives from Coca-Cola’s content, branding, products and legal departments were able to use the Scholz & Volkmer creation to react fast and create and post social content. This newsroom that lasted for a period of four weeks was preceded by months of preparation of marketing assets and possible content.

Creating under time pressure - The parallel watching of matches, brainstorming and designing in the Social Media Newsroom at Scholz & Volkmer. Beforehand, we had to prepare vast amounts of photos and graphics.

Creating under time pressure - The parallel watching of matches, brainstorming and designing in the Social Media Newsroom at Scholz & Volkmer. Beforehand, we had to prepare vast amounts of photos and graphics.

When the time came, the creative team performed at the same high level as the national football team! Under tremendous time pressure, during all 56 matches, they were copywriting, designing, liaising with the client via live chat – and all this every day for four weeks and often even while two matches were going on at the same time.

During the four-week championship, 500 photos and animated GIFs to do with the championship, the individual players and whatever was going on, were posted to 15 European markets in 13 languages - in real time.

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