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When sports marketing moves at the pace of the game, Coca-Cola can’t keep its campaigns or creativity bottled up.
At the beginning of this year’s NCAA men’s and women’s March Madness basketball tournaments, The Coca-Cola Company and its partners at Cartwright Creative released a one-minute spot for Coke Zero Sugar, “Free Throw Madness.”
The spot featured college fans from Tennessee, Duke (including alum and ESPN analyst Jay Williams), Connecticut, South Carolina (including graduate and 2023 WNBA No. 1 draft pick Aliyah Boston), Arizona State, Louisiana State and others placing curses on men’s and women’s free-throw shooters, contorting their faces into manic screams to the tune of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You.”
The ad launched in early March, and Coca-Cola could’ve simply let it run through the tournament, ignoring the less relevant references as teams dropped out, the escalating women’s tournament ratings through the Sweet 16 and Elite 8 and Deloitte’s warning that brands could reap seven dollars of value for every dollar spent on women’s sports. However, the company didn’t do that.
Instead, Coca-Cola and Cartwright went to Los Angeles on April 1, shooting new footage for the schools the first ad missed—North Carolina State, Purdue, Alabama and Iowa (complete with a player with an oddly familiar dark ponytail). They cobbled together two new spots—one for the men’s tournament and one for the women’s—out of new and existing footage, dropping Williams and keeping Boston.
As one of the NCAA’s top-tier “Corporate Champion” sponsors, Coca-Cola had its ad run on TBS and ESPN in front of growing Final Four viewership for both men’s and women’s games and during finals in which the women’s viewership for Caitlin Clark’s Iowa and Dawn Staley’s champion South Carolina squad outpaced the men’s by four million.
ADWEEK spoke with Coca-Cola North America’s chief of marketing, Shakir Moin, about keeping up with modern sports fans, acknowledging the growing power of women’s sports and finding Coca-Cola’s often surreal place in sports fandom.
ADWEEK: In an era of sports marketing where all of your social media and much of your digital marketing can update with the game’s progress, not having an adaptable ad campaign seems like a wasted opportunity. How did this one come together?