The Client at Coke

Coke has enjoyed a creative renaissance of late. Pio Schunker, the company's SVP for creative excellence, discusses the revival

By Patrick Burgoyne

Turner Duckworth's redesign for Coca-Cola has won a lot of top awards over the past year: the first design Grand Prix at Cannes, a D&AD Yellow Pencil and a place in the Creative Review Annual. Some people wonder what all the fuss is about: "It's just a tidying up exercise, stripping Coke back to its iconic essentials, what's creative about that?" they ask. But for anyone who has had to deal with a large organisation and all the political machinations that entails, Turner Duckworth's Coke project is exemplary: it's an all-too-rare instance of a big player doing the right thing, junking all the gratuitous visual nonsense that clutters so much FMCG packaging in favour of purity and simplicity. Some have even intimated that, so rare is it for a huge brand to buy such thoughtful design, the awards should really have gone to the client. That client is Pio Schunker.

Schunker joined Coke from the New York office of ad agency Ogilvy five years ago to help revitalize a brand that he admits had lost its way. He now glories in the title of Senior Vice President for Creative Excellence, North America. He and his team oversee Coke's relations with its advertising agencies and design consultancies, a roster that includes Wieden + Kennedy, Mother, Crispin Porter + Bogusky and Turner Duckworth. Schunker says that he deliberately targeted independents to work with. The big networks, he says, were just giving Coke what they thought it wanted, not what they them­selves believed in. He wanted to work with agencies and design studios who would, rather than simply "stick around for the pay cheque", believe in what they were doing and walk away if they didn't get to do it. He is adamant that he doesn't want yes men, willing to do anything that the client wants, but strong-willed, committed people who are unafraid to express an opinion: "You want an agency to act as your conscience," he says, "to say "that's crap, you shouldn't do that, we're not doing it". We value them far more if they value themselves—if they just become doormats we lose respect for them," he says.

Schunker is quite scathing in his assessment of the behaviour of many potential suitors: "Most agencies come to you with an execution that they want to sell you and then post-rationalise why you should be buying it. Digital agencies are the worst—why exactly does a soda belong on Facebook?" Big networks, he has said, typically present themselves as the 360 degree solution "but tend to be a loose confederation of completely disjointed companies that are so busy fighting with each other to figure out who gets the business, they can't be bothered to figure out how to solve our business [issues]."

He has described his Creative Excellence department (the name, he admits, was met with much derision when first announced) as "translators": agencies and designers pitch ideas to them rather than to marketing managers. In turn, they champion the work internally as it wends its often interminable way through all the channels within the organisation. For Turner Duckworth, this meant an 18-month wait between pitching an initial design idea for the revamped Coke can to the first sign-off. During that period, Schunker's team was steadily piloting the idea through the Coke labyrinth: their biggest battle, convincing Coke marketers that, no, it wasn't necessary to have a picture of some bubbles on the side of the can. People know Coke is a fizzy drink.

An exasperated Turner Duckworth was on the point of throwing in the towel after nine months of seemingly going nowhere, prompting Schunker to fly to San Francisco to reassure them. "I had to say 'trust me, things are moving even though it doesn't look like it. Stick with us: every day we are moving one centimetre forward.'"

As testament to the success of his department's internal advocacy, Schunker claims that 70% of what Turner Duckworth originally pitched to Coke is now in production—for Wieden that figure is closer to 90%, astonishing for a company of Coke's size and previous conservatism.

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