Coca-Cola renews global marketing partnership

The Coca-Cola Company will carry on working with WPP's open X on a global level, after partnering up with Publicis for the North America media buying business. In a statement to MARKETING-INTERACTIVE, a WPP spokesperson confirmed the news.

In a LinkedIn post, the unit under WPP reflected on the collaboration, stating, “Over the past three years, we’ve pushed boundaries together, pioneering a new open-source marketing model, launching Studio X, and harnessing the power of AI to connect with consumers in bold, innovative ways.”

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Manuel Manolo Arroyo, global chief marketing officer at The Coca-Cola Company, also shared the news on LinkedIn. Reflecting on the past three years, he highlighted key milestones including the global scaling of Open X, which he described as the industry’s first open-source marketing model.

“We are living a special moment in marketing at The Coca-Cola Company, and I’m glad to have WPP Open X on our team to help us create the future of marketing,” he added.

The Coca-Cola Company first appointed WPP as its global marketing network partner in 2021, tasking the agency group with executing a new marketing model designed to drive long-term growth across its portfolio of brands in more than 200 countries and territories.

Operating under the bespoke WPP team OpenX, the partnership was set up to deliver end-to-end capabilities across creative, media and data. The pitch was first called in the second half of 2020.

At the time, Coca-Cola described the scale and depth of the partnership as unprecedented, not just for the company, but for the industry. The agreement spanned Coca-Cola’s five-category beverage portfolio, as well as its global ventures including innocent and Costa, with the goal of transforming marketing effectiveness and efficiency.

Meanwhile, WPP has made structural changes of its own. Just last week, it announced that creative agency Grey would be moved under Ogilvy, shifting its reporting structure from the AKQA Group. According to internal memos seen by MARKETING-INTERACTIVE, the move is intended to boost collaboration and unlock growth opportunities across the WPP network.

On the media side, WPP has also renamed GroupM into WPP media, and the restructure has led to several major layoffs across markets.

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