A marketing revolution is on the march out of Atlanta, sweeping out old advertising and brand ideas worldwide

TO MARK SERGIO ZYMAN 'S 50TH birthday in July, senior executives at the Coca-Cola Co. threw a party for the chief marketing officer on a Monday morning. The fete, held in the rarefied air of the 24th-floor executive suites of Coke's North Avenue Tower in Atlanta, had one problem: Only a handful of Zyman's staff showed up. A frantic call was made to the marketing department on the 14th floor, requesting volunteers to come upstairs and attend the occasion. Those who arrived were given T-shirts emblazoned with the acronym GUTS. The message was spelled out as "Get Used To Sergio."

Like him or not, Zyman is a whirlwind to contend with. Two years after his triumphant return to the company he left following the New Coke debacle a decade ago, many of Zyman's colleagues, as well as the numerous ad agencies who work for him, are still struggling with the directive to "get used to Sergio ." Zyman has been unabashed about knocking over, breaking up and putting down nearly every convention or practice he inherited. As he said to a meeting of several hundred Coke marketers and agency executives in Miami last January, "Change is certain; progress is not."

The message from the top levels of Coca-Cola is that change has meant progress under Zyman. To drive home the point, Coke recently arranged for an Adweek interview with Zyman and M. Douglas Ivester, president and chief operating officer--the first such joint interview they'd done, according to Coke officials. (See story, page 34.) In Ivester's offices on the 25th floor--one floor above the newly-ascended marketer--the duo stresses how intimately involved Zyman is with Coca-Cola's business decisions. "When Sergio joined us, we agreed on a couple of things up front," says Ivester. "He was not the advertising director, and he was not the marketing director. He would be chief marketing officer. A chief marketing officer is a businessman who understands cash flow and has expertise in the marketing arena. That is probably as big a shift for our organization--for any organization--to make the business of the company marketing."

Despite the leisurely tone of his Southern accent, Ivester is a hard-driving, results-focused executive. He came up through the company's financial ranks, oversaw Coke operations in Europe (where he breached Eastern Europe swiftly after the collapse of the Berlin Wall) and North America, and helped spin off Coca-Cola Enterprises, the company's biggest bottler. As president, he relies on Zyman for strategic insights. "I might see a commercial once every three months or something like that," Ivester says. "But we don't spend our time talking about the commercials or the marketing programs. We spend our time talking about the opportunities."

To capitalize on those opportunities, Ivester notes that Zyman has much greater budget control--across many departments and divisions--than any predecessor. "Marketing at the company is no longer a function," says Zyman. "It's no longer, 'you have marketing, finance, operations and legal.' Marketing is what we do." Short and lithe, Zyman punctuates his remarks with body language. He clearly enjoys taking the stage, and his appetite for performance has grown with his expanded role. Says Zyman, "What we do is we have to find ways to sell more product in order to make more money in the most efficient way, right? What I've said in interviews is that marketing is too important to be left only to the marketing guys. What we're bringing in is an infusion of blood."

For many agencies, it's their blood that has either been spilled--or raced faster--since Zyman returned, Napoleon-like, from exile. He has wholly reformulated Coca-Cola's relationship with advertising agencies in his 27 months. Instead of relying on a few account and media handlers for all brands and all regions, Zyman has opened up Coca-Cola's advertising to the brightest thinkers--and, some say, lowest bidders--in the business. Coke now boasts an arsenal of nearly 30 agencies, including top names in the U.S. like Wieden & Kennedy and Fallon McElligott (and, until a client conflict, TBWA/Chiat Day), and hot shops around the world like Bartle Bogle Hegarty of London and Spain's Casadevall Pedreno & PSG. He has a French agency developing creative for the American market and a Chicago stronghold doing worldwide campaigns for a New Age drink.

Zyman is blunt about why he broke down his company's four-decade reliance on a single agency. "You have great talent [at the top of agencies], and it starts going down real quick," he says. "So you end up with 17 brands in one agency. One brand's going to get the good stuff; the rest are going to get Xerox copies of the same creative. It's that simple."

What's more, Zyman has deliberately moved responsibility for writing strategy in-house, taking it away from the agency account executives and planners. "We are the stewards of strategy," he says. "The advertising agencies are supposed to execute strategies that we devise." Starting in January, he also will roll out a new compensation system for all of Coke's shops, one which he says will reward and motivate them more effectively. Amidst all this change, Zyman has elevated himself above the day-to-day dealings with agencies, leaving that to his director of advertising, David Wheldon. A former agency executive himself, Wheldon has tried to match Zyman's appetite for rewriting the agency rules with a new set of rules about agency conduct and performance. (See story, page 52.)

And the upheavals don't end with Coke's agencies. Zyman has ordered a host of marketing initiatives, putting lavish money into the brand's promotion and presence. This past summer, in an under-the-cap program dubbed Red Hot Summer, Coke offered $55 million in prizes and a record $1.5 billion in potential retail discounts to U.S. drinkers. Coke inked a $60-million deal to be the sole soft drink sponsor of the 1996 Olympics, when the world will focus intently on its hometown for three weeks. From putting a Coke dispenser into the Discovery space shuttle (for "research into fountain dispensers in weightless environments," according to Coke and NASA) to recruiting Bill Gates for a Coke ad tied to the Windows 95 mega-launch, Zyman is conducting allegro con brio. "Sergio has forced a pace of change in that company that is unbelievable," marvels one ad exec currently working for Coke.

But change, again, doesn't necessarily equal progress--at least for bewildered agencies. The pace and dramatic nature of the change in Coke has worn down many agencies used to more predictable patterns of client behavior. Zyman acknowledges his decisions at times have left agencies dazed; during a speech before Coke marketers and agencies in Atlanta in February, he scared them with talk of agencies' irrelevance. "The element of fear, I hope that doesn't exist anymore," says Zyman of the reaction from those in attendance. "But I think they [the agencies] weren't doing what they were supposed to be doing. They are advertising agencies. They have all these people who come to you and say, 'I'd like to talk to you about a new marketing plan.' You say, well, where are the ads? The first thing they've got to do, before they bring us anything else, they've got to bring us ads."

Although Ivester promised, upon rehiring Zyman in the summer of'93, that this one-time enfant terrible of the soft drink business was now different and more grown up, the vestiges of the old Sergio are never lurking deep beneath the surface. "Sergio was always a 900-pound gorilla," says a former McCann-Erickson executive. "But now he's an 1,800-pound gorilla." "He's a crazy genius, mercurial, autocratic," says Mike Lesser, founder of TV Direct and a former chairman/ceo of Marschalk and Lowe Marschalk. "He hates it when people get comfortable. He's a dangerous person in power, but the business needs it. Sergio has the capacity to make himself over: He can become someone else."

The New Zyman has brought plenty of new talent with him to Coke. "His strengthening of the marketing team has made a big difference," says Tony Eames, president/ceo of Coca-Cola Ltd. of Canada. "There's a much clearer strategic direction." Zyman decided early on he couldn't fight a revolution with soldiers who represented the old regime. He's turned over much of the marketing ranks on the 14th floor and out in the field, hiring some 125 new executives. Many of these recruits, Zyman points out, are untainted by soft drink habits (and, of course, more likely to be loyal and uncritical of him). Instead, they come from companies like Colgate-Palmolive, Scott Paper and Procter & Gamble, where they learned about marketplace disciplines other than the cola wars. Zyman derides some of the policies of former Coke marketers and colleagues, such as Peter Sealey and Michael Beindorff. The image handlers of the past, he's fond of saying, were "soft drink smart and marketing stupid." Sealy in turn looks skeptically at the importing of non-soft drink types: "Soft drink marketing, along with bottling systems, is unique," he says. "The skills are not as transferable as from one packaged goods area to another."

"At end of day, the job of marketing is to facilitate volume growth," Zyman insists. "It's not about traveling around the world with a bag of ideas or sales organizers or brands and saying, 'Hey, want to launch a brand?' The reality is to look at the competitive situation in each market from an image perspective."

From the view on Wall Street, Coca-Cola couldn't be performing better. The company's stock price has soared into the 70s from the low 40s a year ago--a much higher run-up than the buoyant market overall. Yet Coke's stock price had gone steadily upward well before Zyman returned. As the company likes to repeat, in charts and press releases, its market value has expanded mightily since Roberto Goizueta became chairman/ceo in 1981. That $80-billion-plus increase is ascribed to the ever-increasing volumes of Coke brands flowing down the world's throats.

In 1994--Zyman's first full year as marketing chief--Coke Classic volume grew 8% worldwide. At first glance, that growth rate may seem a mere trickle compared to high-octane industries like computer software and telecommunications. But Ivester and Zyman refocus the evaluation. "You're looking at percentages, and what we tend to step back and look at is absolutes," says Ivester. "Coca-Cola last year, whatever its percentage growth was, grew over 500 million cases." ("That 'mature' brand," Zyman interjects.) "It'll do better than that this year. What we need to do is look at building our businesses. If we can grow Diet Coke 100-150 million cases, the percentages become less meaningful than the absolutes."

Zyman admits that for some Coke products, even the absolutes are lackluster. "Not all of our brands are flying," he says. "We have smaller brands that are still struggling to find their place in the sun." Zyman made his name the first time around at Coke as a champion of new brands--fighting the corporate culture to launch Diet Coke, which became a hit, and then imploding with New Coke. This time, he's stepped up the new product pace even more. During his absence, iced teas like Snapple and other "alternative" beverages came out of nowhere to make small but noticeable inroads. Zyman has responded in kind.

In 1994, Zyman introduced two new products, Fruitopia and OK cola. A quirky, offbeat, carbonated drink aimed at teens, OK never generated any momentum in its test markets, and Coke mercifully terminated it a few months ago. Fruitopia, a line of fruit-flavored drinks aimed at the Snapple crowd, was launched with much more fanfare and ambition. Many in the industry regard it as a disappointment, since its annual sales of some $60 million are light years from the $400 million the company projected--and dismal for a brand that has an ad budget of some $20-30 million. "Fruitopia has peaked and is waning from our point of view," says Bob Wilkinson, a Hunstville, Ala., Coke bottler and president of Coca-Cola's U.S. bottler association. "But I'm glad we had that sort of thing available. It shows the leadership Coca-Cola ought to have shown."

Such mixed reviews demonstrate the challenges ahead of Zyman. Coke's portfolio of its leading brands--Classic, Diet, Fanta and Sprite--keep bottlers humming and profits steady. But while Coke has to battle Pepsi continually for prime cola turf, it also has to strike out into new areas. Even if Zyman's major initiatives of the 1990s--Tab Clear, OK and Fruitopia--have largely fizzled, it seems more important in Atlanta that he actually tried them, rather than whether they worked. If anything, it was not a new product or ad, but an old shape that did the most last year to drive Coke's sales. The introduction of its contour bottle, an idea that had been kicking around since the late 1980s, was "arguably the single most effective differentiation the soft drink industry has seen in many years," Goizueta wrote shareholders.

Was the contour a result of Zyman's enhanced marketing powers? Bottlers like Wilkinson regard the corporate directives in Atlanta with detached bemusement. "It's, 'I want to create the world in two years so I can get credit for it,'" he says. "People who look at Coca-Cola and dream of those [marketing] wizards are off on cloud nine. This is a simple business. It's only after you learn how simple this business is that you can do anything."

Although he would never use a word like "wizard," Ivester in his own way echoes the theme of marketing pre-eminence. "It's not really as complex as it might appear," he says of the company's hydra-headed marketing relationships. "We've always had ability to manage a large, diverse portfolio of operations. We're applying that same level of expertise to the marketing element of our business in a way that we never have before."

The reception hall of Coca-Cola's headquarters features several tributes to Robert Woodruff, the steely architect of Coke's growth from popular U.S. soft drink to global giant. On the wall of an alcove abutting the North Avenue Tower is an inscription bearing one of The Boss' favorite platitudes: "There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit."

It is a delicious irony that Sergio Zyman has become one of the most powerful executives in a company founded on that principle. If Zyman's career in the soft drink business has been a series of picaresque adventures, each one more colorful and astonishing than the last, then the leitmotif running through this drama is the persistent belief among friend and foe that the only thing greater than Zyman's accomplishments is his own titanic ego.

Zyman was born to an affluent family in Mexico City. He never finished college, but did latch on to Procter & Gamble in Mexico City in 1968, then joined McCann-Erickson's office there. From the start, some of the go-getter behavior patterns that defined his style became apparent. One year, he was put in charge of a Coca-Cola Worldwide management meeting to be held at the Maria Isabel Hotel. According to a McCann colleague, Zyman did far more than order beverage exhibits for the lobby of the hotel. At the request of some visiting brass, he lined up eight beautiful women in a penthouse suite, all of whom were to be available for discussions beyond carbonated beverages. "That's patently untrue," says a Coke official, who says Zyman had nothing to do with setting up the managers' meeting.

In the mid-1970s, Zyman's career led him to Brian Dyson, Coca-Cola's head of Latin American operations. The pair's interest in soft drinks and nightlife coincided exactly, and they became fast friends, with Dyson the mentor to his youthful sidekick. They both landed in Atlanta in the late '70s, Dyson as head of Coke USA and Zyman as executive assistant to Coke president Don Keough. Within two years, Zyman was put in charge of two projects that turned out to be big successes for the company: a new ad campaign from McCann ("Coke Is It?") and a new product that some executives in Atlanta were afraid would dilute Big Red: Diet Coke.

Flush with his triumphs, Zyman was confident and cocky as ever. He boasted to friends he would be president of a company by the time he hit 40. On the road, he enjoyed the good life. He was a regular at Le Cirque in New York, where colleagues would see him in the company of attractive women and $100 bottles of wine. In Atlanta, he and Dyson worked hard and played hard.

Into this heady atmosphere came New Coke. Zyman threw himself into it, trusting his instincts as he had on Diet Coke. But ignoring the research--which showed people did not want to lose their old Coca-Cola--proved fatal. A year after New Coke bombed in 1985, Zyman resigned. He ended up the fall guy for a project embraced by many of Coke's senior managers as well. Now past his 40th birthday, he was not only not a corporate president; his career was in tatters.

Nonetheless, Zyman was rewarded for being a good soldier. Keough, who valued Zyman's maverick approach to the business, brought him in quietly to consult on various projects. Zyman's rehabilitation took another step forward when Keough steered him toward Douglas Ivester, who was head of North American operations. On track to become president, Ivester was advised to bone up on marketing. Instead of dealing with global marketing director Peter Sealey, however, Ivester started having private sessions with Zyman at his home. During those meetings, Zyman would explain his vision of what marketing should be about, spicing his opinions with criticism of the way Sealey was handling Diet Coke and other brands.

Even as a consultant, Zyman wielded considerable power. Although Sealey was head of marketing, Zyman signed up a pair of ad agencies--according to sources, Fallon McElligott and Chiat/Day--to work on projects he was controlling. And once Keough retired, in April 1993, Sealey's tenure grew short. The chemistry between Sealey and Ivester was bad; Sealey viewed him as an "overgrown accountant," according to a former colleague of both. In the summer of 1993, Ivester fired Sealey at one of their weekly meetings on the 25th floor.

Re-enter Sergio.

When Doug Ivester announced in July 1993 that Zyman was returning to the company to head up marketing, one of the secretaries present began to cry, asking "Why him?" out loud. Ivester was quick to assure staff that Zyman had changed his ways, that the man who was rejoining the company in the exalted position of chief marketing officer was more mature than the swashbuckling marketeer who had cut such a wide swath there in the 1980s.

Now, more than two years after his return, Zyman has consolidated his position as the most powerful marketing executive in Coke's recent history. Zyman makes far more than Sealey ever did. On top of his base salary of $348,000, he was welcomed into an executive bonus program that could net him an additional $1.3 million annually.

Exercising the prerogatives of the returning conqueror, Zyman has pushed aside a number of officers in international markets in Europe, Latin America and Asia, installing in their places his own selections. His internal shakeup has caused some grumbling about turf and duties. "Unhappy brand managers? If they're that unhappy, I'll be glad if they leave," Zyman growls. "Some traditional brand managers all their life have been making decisions a certain way. So they're mad now because they don't go to New York City to eat bagels." More critically, the rise of information technology has let a company like Coca-Cola expand its reach well beyond Atlanta. "Fundamentally, there's nobody in marketing around the world who's not wired into [the system]," Zyman says. "It just so happens that I'm Atlanta-based and there are people who are France-based. Nobody works for Coca-Cola France. They work for the Coca-Cola Company in France. The marketing director in France works for the marketing division in this instance, works for me."

Given such broad scope and direct control, the route to Zyman is a path that scores of agencies and Coke colleagues study and pursue. Some try to share his personal interests. Zyman used to pen an occasional column on wine for Atlanta magazine, and his well-stocked wine cellar includes many gifts from agency contacts. One former Lintas account exec now chuckles at his frenzied attempts to stay close to Zyman by going jogging with him in the morning when the Coke team was visiting New York. He'd scribble some notes, tuck them into his sock before seeing Zyman, then refer to them when discussing business in Central Park at full tilt.

The gatekeeper for agencies, however, is Wheldon. It was Wheldon who organized the conference in February at which Zyman, invited to welcome all the newcomers to the roster, as well as greet the regulars, ended up "thrashing" the agencies, according to one attendee. Wheldon and Zyman are in rapport on the extensive nature of Coke's agency list. The gritty details of keeping the assignments straight and the frictions narrow falls to Wheldon. Zyman presumably will keep a strong say in the new compensation and funding schemes.

But the real key to keeping up with Sergio may be found in a comment he made on the 10th anniversary of his Waterloo, the launch of New Coke. The company hosted a mock "celebration" of the event this spring, vowing it would never again resort to such desperate measures. When Zyman took the podium, he noted that one lesson was that "sameness will kill you." He said Coke had learned never to act like a "shallow chameleon that routinely sells out its own fundamental nature just to mirror the trend of the moment."

Whether Zyman wrote the line himself, or it came from his $10,000-per-month speechwriter and former co-consultant Scott Miller, the phrase seems to capture Zyman's essence. He has a remarkable ability to grasp and embrace trends and cultural currents, and he has shown amazing skill, over two decades, at reinventing himself in a constant race to remain a vital part of the soft drink industry.

At a point in his career when most soft drink executives would relax and enjoy the fruits of their long labor, Zyman has become the most powerful figure in the world of advertising, able to pick and choose from the world's roster of glamour agencies, carry out media and promotional jaunts as bold as can be dreamed of, and bask in the reflected glow of the almighty brand. He clearly enjoys it: "Don't you think I'm a brilliant marketing guru?" he will ask his aides with a smile.

Brilliant, but perhaps brittle. "Disciplined creativity is a great thing," says Michael Beindorff, who ran the Diet Coke business from 1984 to 1992 and is now executive vp/marketing at Visa USA in San Francisco. "But creativity without discipline is not productive." The hectic pace of change forced by Zyman looks to be the rule, and some wonder how long the company--or Zyman himself--can maintain the momentum. "Sergio is a catalyst to shake things up. As long as you're moving and there's activity, in a way, that's progress," says a former McCann-Erickson executive who worked with Zyman in the New Coke years. "You can say what you want about Zyman, but the company's using him the right way. It's a killer job. I don't think there are many people in the business with the energy level of Zyman."

While his strengths are innovation, speed and energy, Zyman's weaknesses are evident as well: a lack of deliberation, impatience and unpredictability. He has sown the seeds of revolution throughout the Coca-Cola empire, but he may not be a man to wait around for the harvest. Zyman has told associates in Atlanta that he doesn't plan to hang around for years and years. As a self-described agent of change, he knows that the time for him to change, once more, will arrive someday. "Sergio is like a Broadway show," explains one former Coke executive with strong ties to the company. "But how long is this show going to run?"

As long as the volume and profit numbers, recited in almost kabbalistic fashion by Coke executives, keep trending upward. And as long as Zyman remains in sync with Ivester. As they make plain in their interview, they share the same view of the company as relentless marketer, pouring everything into the central idea of the brand, while eagerly seeing what spills over the top. One executive who knows them both notes how alike they are: "If you ask them to shake the tree, they'll pull it out by the roots."

[tabular data omitted]

The ADWEEK Poll

Just for the Taste of It

The primary reason you buy a particular

brand of soft drink is:

Toatal Male Female

Taste 71.1 75.7 67.0

Price 22.1 19.7 24.3

Health/diet 14.9 11.5 18.1

Convenience 13.1 12.3 13.9

Brand loyalty 10.1 10.8 9.5

Product image 4.2 4.4 4.0

Promotion 4.0 4.8 3.2

Other 6.2 3.7 8.5

N/A 5.4 4.2 6.5

Demo date: Taste falls off among older buyers (only 55% of 65+ cite it)...Baby boomers aged 35-49 are most price-sensitive (30%)...Northwest responds to price wars (29%), West doesn't (17%)...The old and wealthy cite health more often...Kids care about convenience (22%) and product image (10%)...Under $20k income) are least brand loyal.

The ADWEEK Poll

Obey Your Brand Thirst?

Of last 10 soft drinks

bought, how many were:

# Coke Pepsi

10 18.7 14.8

9 2.1 2.3

8 4.3 2.5

7 2.2 1.8

6 3.3 2.0

5 10.6 8.7

4 2.7 2.9

3 5.5 5.0

2 6.3 7.4

1 7.7 8.0

0 30.1 37.9

N/A 6.5 6.7

Mean

of buyers 5.9 5.5

Demo data: The oldest swore off both brands the most (40% of 65+ reported no Cokes, 54% no Pepsi)...The youngest were most fanatic about Coke (24% of 18-24 bought 10 vs. 16% for Pepsi)...South and West are Coke loyalists (20% as 10-buyers in each, vs. 11% for Pepsi).

The ADWEEK Poll

Danger: Less Beats More

Compared to 2-3 years ago,

are you drinking soft drinks...

More 13.7

Less 38.5

About same 44.8

N/A 3.0

Demo data: The young are the restless: 21% are drinking yet 46% are drinking less; only 30% stay the same...Over 65s simply won't imbibe; just 2% increased consumption...Still in recession? 46% of under $20k are drinking less...Women are cutting back more rapidly: 42% of females drink less, vs 35% of males

The ADWEEK Poll

No Itch to Switch

Have you changed your favorite

brand in last 2-3 years?

Total 18-34 35-49 50+

Yes 12.5 19.5 9.6 8.1

No 80.6 76.8 87.4 78.4

No favorite 2.9 1.6 2.5 5.0

N/A 4.0 2.1 0.5 8.5

The ADWEEK Poll

Reasons to Change

Those who switched

brands did so because of...

Health/diet/less caffeine 28.8

Wanted change, tired of old 24.1

Taste 22.3

Price 8.1

No longer available 5.4

Other reasons 15.0

N/A 3.3

Demo data: Remember, only 12.5% of those polled did change favorite brand...Of those, women influenced by health/diet (41% of women cited as factor)...The young just wanted to change, period: 35% of 18-24 said so...Also were motivated by taste buds (35%)...In the West, 19% changed because old brand not readily available.

How the Poll Was Done

The Adweek poll of consumers was conducted by Bruskin/Goldring Research of Edison, N.J., from Sept. 22-24, 1995. A total of 1,008 phone interviews were completed, using a random-digit dialing sampling method ([greater or less than] 3.2% error rate) to represent the U.S. adult population 18 and older. The raw data was weighted to adjust five factors--sex, age, education, race and geographic region--to more closely match Census data. The open-ended (unprompted) questions were asked of favorite soft drink brand and last commercials seen. All others were asked as multiple-choice (closed) questions.

Years in a Life: Sergio Zyman

1968-1975

The education of Sergio Zyman

Zyman works for Procter & Gamble, then McCann-Erickson in Mexico City, Japan and Atlanta; then to Marschalk in New York. Says hello to the young John Dooner, then gets shipped to McCann Guatemala.

1975-1979

Choice of a New Generations

Zyman skips McCann for Pepsi in South America. Befriends Brian Dyson of Coca-Cola eludes Pepsi's Roger Enrico and leaves Brazil

1979-1982

Coke, Part I

Zyman works as executive assistant to Coke president Don Keough. After crossing Marvin Griffin head of USA bottling, Zyman is pushed out in January 1982 but not before greenlighting "Coke Is It!" campaign and launch of Diet Coke through SSC&B. Dyson sends him to Harvard grad school gig in Switzerland.

1983-1985

Coke Was It

After his return to Atlanta, Zyman is assigned to New Coke, a project he embraces enthusiastically.

1986

Voyage to Elba

Following New Coke debacle, Zyman's main sponsor, Dyson, moves to Coca-Cola Enterprises. Zyman resigns.

1986-1988

The Years in Exile

Through Coke fountain relationships, Zyman lands consulting gigs at Hardee's and 7-Eleven; works with political consultant Scott Miller.

1989-1992

Outside In

Keough brings Zyman back as a consultant, turning to him to launch Tab Clear in Britain. Zyman works with Lowe Howard-Spink in London and befriends David Wheldon. Zyman tries to insinuate himself into Diet Coke. Meanwhile, Coke shocks ad world by hiring CAA to do creative work.

1992-1993

The Restoration of the Crown

Zyman gives Doug Ivester weekend lessons in marketing. Following Keough's retirement, new Coke president/tester fires marketing chief Peter Sealey and installs Zyman as chief marketing officer Wheldon hired as ad manager.

1994-1995

In All His Glory

Despite public embrace of CAA, Zyman tries to dismiss agency, but Ovitz appeals to a higher authority and gets decision reversed. (Coca-Cola denies this happened.) Zyman introduces Fruitopia and OK soda, repositions Sprite, struggles on Diet Coke. He tortures his old employers at McCann by encouraging his brand managers to look elsewhere for agency partners. The global lineup takes shape as new creative, media and service contracts are assigned.

SOME HICCUPS

Wondering why you haven't seen many spots for Coke Classic or Diet Coke in recent months? According to Competitive Media Reporting figures, ad spending for both brands is down sharply through the first seven months of this year compared to recent years. "If you're seeing fewer Coca-Cola commercials, that's good," says Chuck Fruit, Coke's media director. Translation: Coke is spending less but targeting its ads more precisely to certain demos and day-parts. "You probably won't see a lot of our stuff because you're at work," says Zyman. Or because we don't watch a lot of Fox programs, which score high with Coke's desired 12-24-year-olds.

Still, the ad rotation doesn't fully explain Cokes lowered profile. It is spending notably less on Classic and Diet this year (see chart), while Sprite is on track for record support. For Diet Coke, ad spending in excess of $60 million has been the norm in '91, '92 and '94. In 1993, however, the year of the disastrous "Taste It All" campaign and the review which sent the business from Lintas to Lowe, total spending plummeted to $24 million.

Coke Classic is also running at a depressed level not seen since 1991, when the Gulf War and recession capped the year's output at $58 million. Coke even dropped its Super Bowl ads that year. In the following years, Coke Classic averaged $90 million in support. Unless the polar bears blanket TV this winter, that historic amount will be a dim memory.

Ad spending levels for the major Coca-Cola brands

Diet Coke

Cola Classic Sprite Total

1991 $65 58 27 150

1992 64 90 28 182

1993 24 96 25 145

1994 62 86 33 181

Jan-July '95 20 42 35 97

Source: Competitive Media Reporting. Dollar figures in millions, for measured media spending on network, spot and syndicated TV, cable, radio, magazines, newspapers and outdoor.