How Coke Zero Hustled to Keep Up With Fans in March Madness

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?

Moin: The work behind this started more than 15 months back. 

The work started with fall football, and we continued to take the idea of March Madness. One of the things we realized is that we sometimes endanger our work by logo pasting: There’s an event, we are a partner of it and we are bringing this event to you. That doesn’t have a lot of relevance for an average person.

For about four months, we kept obsessing about this: We understand sports and we understand our brand, but what is the nexus where the two meet? Passionate fans have one thing in common: They sing, dance, cheer and enjoy themselves, and when they do that, they get thirsty. When they get thirsty, hopefully, they’re going to have a Coca-Cola.

The discussion I had with my team was that it has to be something where you cannot put a car, you cannot put a candy, you cannot put a phone: It has to be, first, a beverage and, then, with the values we execute, has to be just Coca-Cola. We found that space, which is “Fan Work is Thirsty Work.”

So what made you opt to illustrate the fan experience this way?

Understanding the culture of basketball, we found this magical space of spells. 

We asked, “How do we bring that to life?” That captures the essence of fan passion. Every spell is physical. It makes us thirsty, and that’s where Coca-Cola comes in. Then, you have the craft behind getting the music and the moments right. Our machinery obsesses about the execution of every single element. Where does the content show up? Why? What is that moment? 

This time, I’m particularly happy because as we got deeper into culture, we saw that the ultimate experience that we can bring when it comes to content is to show Sunday night, who’s going to win the Final Four and put the team up. So far, we don’t have that capability. But once it narrowed, we worked on the elements of logistics. How can we shoot the right stuff, make it available and edit it? It cannot look like a sloppy job just because we’re showing the Final Four teams in it. Thankfully, we were able to get that done for the first time in almost real time so that our message was going out at the same time those teams were playing.

The spots connected a lot of disparate elements—the active teams, the ominous music, the surrealist fan expressions, the face paint, the outfits, famous athletes, the pain of loss, the joy of victory—with two ends of a free throw. How did your creative team link it all together?

On every second Thursday, I have a routine with my creative teams called goosebumps. The four creative directors come in [and] we look at creativity: ours, outside, in the market, thought leaders. Everything comes into play, just to learn.

In last week’s creativity, we were talking about photography, and how to get the Coca-Cola photography right. I’ve been with the company for 28 years, and part of the longevity is understanding the brand deeply—its history, its context. What I’m sharing with them is that word “surreal”: That Coke is a real brand, but it is always surreal because it brings an element of not fantasy but a possibility. A moment that you would want to be in versus the moment you were in. 

Fan passion seemed to be another key element of this campaign, and Coca-Cola addressed it in both the men’s and women’s game. How did Coca-Cola and Cartwright assess the benefits of addressing those audiences separately and ensuring each spot could stand on its own?

Historically, I don’t think we ever used female basketball players in our campaigns. 

We hope that one day women’s basketball is going to be as big as men’s, and can we play a role in this? I obsess a lot on creativity, but one of the dangers that I see is that even with the best of intentions sometimes we don’t get the path right.

The focus on women was all about belief. It has to stand on its own, and the litmus test is that if the men didn’t exist, the women’s work will [still] be awesome. 

That in itself became a brief. On women, the details matter. The fact that [the Iowa player] had a ponytail matters a lot. That was what we were hoping was going to come through because then it is not elitist. It is not a specific group. It shows breaking the boundaries in many ways and interesting ways.

It started with this belief that one day, surely, women are going to be as big as men—maybe bigger. But why not start today?