Coca-Cola Unplugs, Disney Asks US$10m and IAB Show AI Bible

COKE SETS THE TABLE, PHONES NOT INVITED

The laptop closes, the fried chicken arrives and the most important meeting of the day turns out to be dinner.

Coca-Cola's new global campaign 'The World Will Wait', launched on 3 August, asks Gen Z and millennials to put their devices down long enough to eat together, with two hero films, 'Laptop Face' and 'The Most Important Meeting', staging the argument while out-of-home posters carry the punchlines. 

“Laundry can wait. Fried chicken and Coca-Cola can't.”

The campaign arrives weeks after Coca-Cola refreshed its global visual identity, and follows a FIFA World Cup advertising blitz that won the brand the number one share of voice and helped drive 5% volume growth.

 “We’ve observed a growing tension among our consumers, especially younger generations, who truly desire genuine connection,” says Arnab Roy, Global Category President at Coca-Cola, in a statement.

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WHEN THE CUSTOMER ASKS A CHATBOT INSTEAD

Somewhere right now a customer is asking a chatbot which trainers to buy, and no marketer can see the answer it gives.

On 3 August the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) published the first playbook for changing that.

‘Measuring Visibility in the AI Era’ sets out how brands should measure their presence inside AI assistants and answer engines through four Ps.

Presence asks whether a brand appears in AI answers at all, Prominence asks where it ranks, Portrayal asks whether the machine describes it accurately and Persuasion asks whether the answer actually moves a buyer.

The IAB deliberately calls the document guidance rather than a standard, a concession to how fast the platforms beneath it keep changing, and warns that fewer than 50 tracked queries produces a directional reading rather than decision-grade measurement.

THE US$10M HALF-MINUTE

Disney wants a record US$10m for 30 seconds of February’s Super Bowl LXI, and the negotiation has become advertising’s soap opera of the year. Marketing Chief has tracked the standoff deal by deal. The state of play:

1: Disney opened the market asking US$10m per 30-second spot, comfortably above the record prices paid for this year’s game.

2: Large buyers pushed back, and inventory has instead been moving at US$8m to US$9m, with several major holdouts still negotiating.

3: The asking price is a bet on scarcity, since live sport remains the last media buy that guarantees an enormous simultaneous audience rather than an aggregated one.

4: History favours the seller, because the game sells out every year and the latest buyers have tended to pay the highest prices.

STANLEY HIRES A TALKING TOOLBOX

Stanley Black & Decker has launched ‘All Build. No Bull.’, a ten-spot global campaign fronted by Stan, a wisecracking toolbox who mocks overengineered tools.

Rolling out from North America to New Zealand as construction slows, the 180-year-old brand is betting a tightened jobsite budget has no patience for gimmicks.

Stan agrees. “If it sounds like bull, it usually is.”

DOMINO’S PAYS FOR ATTENTION

Domino’s is crediting customers US$5 to beta-test its relaunched app and website ahead of full rollout, turning quality assurance into an engagement campaign.

Most of the chain’s sales arrive through digital channels, which raises the stakes of the replatform considerably, and the earned media landed within a day of the announcement.

AMAZON’S US$19.8BN QUARTER OF SPORT

Amazon’s advertising arm reached US$19.8bn in second-quarter revenue, with live sport doing the selling as NBA coverage joins Thursday Night Football on Prime Video.

Advertising now grows faster than Amazon’s retail business, and its expanding sports rights have become the wedge prising premium video budgets away from the linear television schedules that once owned them.

WHO GETS A SAY IN THE PLATFORMS?

Marketers now route the bulk of their budgets through Amazon, Meta and Google, which makes platform governance a marketing question, and a new paper from the University of Auckland offers some of the most constructive thinking yet on how it might evolve.

In ‘Reining in Big Tech Corporations’, written for a recently published Cambridge University Press collection, Professor Susan Watson argues the platforms have grown into essential digital infrastructure, and that the people who depend on them most, from users to employees, deserve a formal voice in how they are run.

Her proposals include licensing major platforms and sharing governance rights with affected communities.

Susan, whose paper pairs real admiration for capitalism with a reformer's to-do list, argues its newest giants can be reshaped to serve everyone holding a stake in them, which for the brands funding those platforms would mean steadier ground to build on.