“There’s no company that’s more global than Coca-Cola,” says Keith Bartig, director of precision marketing technologies at Coca-Cola. With 200 beverage brands across 200 countries and more than 1.8 billion beverages sold every day, Coca-Cola is making good on its vision to refresh the world.

Traditionally, consumers buy products through vendors and partners — grocery stores, restaurants, and stadiums — rather than interacting directly with the brand. When the company decided to focus on forming personal relationships with consumers, Bartig and Vinay Gopinath, director of global advertising platforms and technical product owner at Coca-Cola, helped lead the charge for a multiyear digital marketing transformation.

Coca-Cola named Adobe Experience Cloud as its global martech standard, bringing hundreds of marketing teams under a single umbrella. Bartig and Gopinath then identified three factors for a successful digital transformation: start off strong with a reliable implementation, support innovative use cases, and drive adoption globally. Partnering with Adobe Professional Services and Ultimate Success was key to accomplishing these goals and empowering Coca-Cola marketers to deliver innovative experiences for consumers and achieve personalization goals.

“We need to have one foot in the current world and another in the future,” says Bartig. “We always want to be on the bleeding edge at Coca-Cola. Our strategic partnership with Adobe helps us stay at the top of the innovation curve.”

Unified support from global teams.

Coca-Cola’s new strategy of direct personalization meant that teams around the world needed to reshape how they approached customer marketing. According to McKinsey, 70% of digital transformation projects fail to meet their goals, often due to insufficient planning and change management. Coca-Cola recognized that it needed both a strong implementation and ongoing support to bring Adobe to all regions and take advantage of global data and creative resources.

Adobe’s “One Adobe” approach to working with Coca-Cola brings together talent and expertise from across teams to deliver a global support footprint. The Professional Services team designs the technical foundation, working closely with enterprise architects and product experts to navigate global regulations while meeting the needs of geographically dispersed marketing teams. The result is a standardized martech platform that provides stability and consistency with regional flexibility.

“Coca-Cola is a pioneer in adopting the latest Adobe technologies,” says Arif Ali, Professional Services lead at Adobe. “With help from Adobe, Coca-Cola marketers can take advantage of each release and stay at the forefront of the industry.”

Ultimate Success layers in strategic guidance and proactive technical support to drive adoption and resolve issues with help from designated customer success managers and technical account managers. Regional experts further supplement the team, partnering with Coca-Cola across time zones. This “follow the sun” mentality helps provide fast responses, reducing the average time to resolution on support cases by 30%.

“It’s an exciting company to work with because they’re really passionate about what they do,” says Jada Reid, Adobe’s Ultimate Success team lead for Coca-Cola. “They’re pushing the boundaries of how they’re using Adobe technology to understand what drives consumers and how they can use that information to connect with them one-to-one. Our team is always thinking about how we can identify successes and share them with regional teams across the company.”

Creating value through thoughtful use cases.

As more regional teams adopt the platform, Coca-Cola can share more campaigns and assets while analyzing greater volumes of customer data to find patterns for personalization. Therefore, encouraging adoption amongst regional teams is critical to the success of the digital marketing transformation.

Coca-Cola works closely with Adobe to develop use cases that deliver strong results, creating examples that inspire other teams around the world. “We drive more adoption by demonstrating value through real world use cases,” says Gopinath. “Adobe helped us discover that some of the strongest campaigns repurposed existing content in new ways for highly cost-effective experiences.”

For instance, WhatsApp is a popular channel around the world — especially for connecting with younger audiences who are growing tired of traditional marketing tactics like email and SMS, and instead gravitate toward more interactive, engaging experiences. Adobe built a custom implementation between WhatsApp and Adobe Journey Optimizer for the India Southwest Asia team, allowing marketers to deliver messages, track interactions, and set the stage for conversational, two-way communication.

“We saw a very high click-through rate of 2.3%, which was significantly higher than traditional channels,” says Ali. “It gives a strong proof of concept for other regions to start engaging younger audiences in newer markets.”

Adobe also helped marketers bring personalization into Coke Studio — a unique experience where audiences can find interviews and exclusive performances from new and upcoming music artists. Marketers now trust a dynamic recommendation module, built on the powerful combination of Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe Target, to personalize experiences for 70% of Coke Studio Bharat audiences based on real-time information.

“Coke Studio was an early example of how we could showcase the impact of personalization,” says Bartig. “It clearly outperformed default experiences and proved the power of fun new ways to engage young audiences who want experiences, not messages.”

Bringing marketing technology to everyone.

Driving adoption isn’t a one-size-fits-all challenge, particularly for a company as diverse as Coca-Cola. Adobe takes a multi-pronged approach that encourages communication and visibility. Monthly Innovation Day sessions review successful use cases, providing a shared sense of accomplishment while giving regional teams ideas they can apply to their own campaigns. The sessions also introduce newly released features that can lead to fresh types of campaigns.

Coca-Cola leadership meets regularly with Adobe teams through monthly leadership check-ins, quarterly business reviews, and product council meetings to make sure that the partnership continues to move the needle toward reaching Coca-Cola’s business objectives. Adobe also holds itself accountable by quantifying the value that it brings to Coca-Cola. Reid and her team map where Adobe technology is live and which apps are being used around the world. This data, along with user satisfaction surveys and quarterly reviews, provides insight into where Adobe can provide more enablement and product awareness to help Coca-Cola reach its goals.

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Leading innovation in industry marketing.

Coca-Cola is moving toward a new phase where hyper-personalization becomes the default for every marketing campaign. The key to achieving personalization at scale, according to Bartig, will be continuous campaign optimization where marketers take advantage of Adobe tools, including generative AI for content generation and experimentation, to continuously reuse and rework campaigns for improved, personalized experiences.

“Working with Adobe Professional Services and Ultimate Success supports our goals by making sure marketers understand how to use new marketing technology and do more for consumers,” says Bartig. “With their help, we’re showing the power of innovation at Coca-Cola.”

Your goals, our expertise. Just like Adobe helps Coca-Cola innovate at scale, Adobe Success Plans can empower your teams with the guidance, training, and strategic roadmaps needed to turn bold ideas into measurable results.

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