Client: Coca-Cola (alongside Fanta and Sprite)
Agency: Likely
Period: March – September 2014
Role: Marketing Executive
Budget: £25,000/month paid social
Overview
Working agency-side at Likely, I managed organic and paid social media campaigns for Coca-Cola across the EMEA region, one of the most recognisable and brand-sensitive accounts a social media marketer can work on. Alongside Coca-Cola, I also supported campaigns for Fanta and Sprite, running activity across seasonal moments, regional initiatives, and product-specific campaigns simultaneously.
At the time, social media advertising was still maturing as a discipline. Managing a £25,000 monthly paid social budget for a brand of Coca-Cola’s scale, across multiple markets, multiple sub-brands, and multiple campaign types, required a high degree of precision, cultural awareness, and platform fluency.
The Challenge
Coca-Cola’s social presence across EMEA isn’t a single, unified campaign, it’s a complex ecosystem of regional audiences, cultural nuances, seasonal moments, and brand guidelines that need to be honoured consistently while still feeling locally relevant. The challenge wasn’t just running effective paid campaigns; it was running them at scale, across diverse markets, without losing the warmth and authenticity that makes Coca-Cola’s marketing so distinctive.
My Role
As the day-to-day executor and analyst on the account, I was responsible for:
- Planning and managing paid social campaigns across EMEA markets, tailored by region, season, and campaign objective
- Running organic social activity in parallel, ensuring consistency between paid and unpaid brand presence
- Delivering regular performance analytics, tracking engagement, reach, and campaign efficiency, and translating data into clear optimisation recommendations
- Adapting creative and targeting strategies for seasonal campaigns (summer, key cultural moments) and regional initiatives, ensuring messaging resonated across different markets and audiences
The Approach
Every campaign required a dual focus: brand consistency and local relevance. For Coca-Cola’s seasonal campaigns, summer being the most significant for a soft drinks brand, the strategy centred on high-energy, visually driven content designed to capture attention in crowded feeds, with paid amplification targeted by geography, demographic, and behavioural signals to maximise relevance by market.
Regional campaigns demanded a more tailored approach, with creative and copy adapted to reflect cultural context, local language nuances, and market-specific consumer behaviour. Throughout all activity, organic and paid social were managed in lockstep, ensuring the brand voice remained consistent whether a consumer encountered a sponsored post or a community update.
Performance analytics were central to everything. Rather than running campaigns to completion and reviewing at the end, I provided ongoing optimisation recommendations throughout each campaign cycle — adjusting targeting, reallocating budget toward better-performing markets, and refining creative based on real-time engagement signals.
The Result
Managing Coca-Cola’s social presence across EMEA at this stage of my career gave me a grounding in large-scale, multi-market campaign management that has shaped how I approach social strategy ever since. The discipline required to balance global brand standards with genuine local relevance, across multiple sub-brands, campaign types, and regional audiences simultaneously, is one of the most transferable skills I took from this role.
Working on one of the world’s most recognised brands, with real budget accountability and a direct line to campaign performance, gave me an early and rigorous education in what effective paid social actually looks like at scale.