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, of course, 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 revitalise 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. His views on what he wants from his partners might seem like music to the ears of our readers. 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.
http://www.creativereview.co.uk/back-issues/creative-review/2009/august-2009/coke-a-simple-story