For most businesses, 2025 has been another challenging year. The global cost of living crisis, tariffs, geopolitical turmoil, and regulatory upheaval have wreaked havoc on bottom lines.

Coca-Cola has not been immune to these pressures, but has nonetheless managed to exceed Wall Street expectations. Its latest trading update showed a company in remarkably robust health as net sales rose 5% to $12.46bn, while organic revenue increased 6%.

And its brand performance has been equally strong. According to Kantar, Coca-Cola is consistently one of the most valuable brands in the world, finding new ways to grow in a very mature category with strong headwinds. In recent years, Coke has been able to grow its meaningfulness and salience in the USA, leading to stronger pricing power as well as the ability to surpass Pepsi. BrandZ data shows how consistently the brand has both created demand (it’s ranked number one in the soft drinks category in 90% of markets) and made it available to consume (accessible to over 50% of drinkers in every market). Today, Coke ranks alongside Nike and Red Bull for the quality of its advertising on a globally weighted basis, largely thanks to the consistency of its executions.

That comes at a cost. Recently, Coca-Cola revealed its global ad spend stood at $5.146bn in 2024, an all-time high. That was up 2.7% from $5.01bn in 2023.

Fueling that performance is a marketing organization that has undergone a complete overhaul over the past four years. And at the center of the transformation is EVP and global chief marketing officer Manuel ‘Manolo’ Arroyo, a nearly 30-year veteran of Coca-Cola who has overseen the restructuring of agency relationships, media strategy, and creative output.

“The market is recognizing that we are definitely at the top in terms of performance,” he says. “We’re managing to drive revenue, volume, and transactions. Obviously, marketing and innovation are the major drivers of the growth of our company. Our company is a marketing company. It’s pretty much the heart and the soul.”

## From Fragmentation to Focus

When Arroyo set out to modernize the function in 2021, Coca-Cola’s marketing ecosystem was sprawling and complex. The business was working with approximately 6,000 agency partners globally, while the majority of its multi-billion-dollar media budget was allocated to traditional channels. Arroyo wanted fewer partners, deeper integration, and a shift towards digital-first execution at scale.

That ambition led to the consolidation of Coca-Cola’s global advertising account into WPP and the creation of Open X, a bespoke unit designed to manage the brand across markets and disciplines. Nine studios were established in key regions, housing a mix of Coca-Cola employees, WPP staff, and specialist partners.

“It’s a marketing factory,” says Arroyo. “There are more than 2,000 employees of Coca-Cola and more than 2,000 employees of WPP […] and ultimately it’s enabled us to move from a company that in 2019 was investing close to 75% of our paid media on traditional TV, to a company that’s going to end up this year putting 70% of all our paid media on digital, particularly social and influencer led, marketing. For us, it’s our new TV.”

WPP’s stewardship of the global business has coincided with a period of intense pressure on holding companies. WPP has felt that most acutely, with its share price tumbling amid client losses and significant restructuring. Arroyo also made the decision to move Coca-Cola’s North American media business out of WPP to Publicis earlier this year, which only heightened scrutiny.

The turmoil ultimately led to a leadership shake-up. CEO Mark Read departed in September to make way for Cindy Rose, a former Microsoft executive.

From Arroyo’s perspective, proximity to WPP staffers in its nine studios has bred a level of understanding and given his teams a sympathetic view of the pressures facing the ad industry, from margin compression to accelerating technological change. Despite the introduction of rival Publicis into the mix, Arroyo is unequivocal in his support for WPP’s direction under new leadership and optimistic about the work it will continue to deliver.

“WPP is very bullish and I’m a huge advocate and supporter of the direction that [Cindy Rose] is taking in the industry. We’re really happy with the partnership. They are deploying for us right now the next iteration in media.”

## A New Modern Media Approach

Consolidation has also delivered significant efficiency gains. Advertising productivity has become a central pillar of Coca-Cola’s growth strategy, enabling the company to achieve even more with its record levels of spending.

Arroyo is now looking at what the coming years will deliver. He calls the next phase of that evolution a “modern media” approach, which builds on the structural changes of the past four years and pushes the organization further towards data-led, highly segmented execution.

It will be deployed in its top 40 markets globally at the end of this year and in more than 76 markets by the end of the first quarter next year.

For a business that was not born digital and does not sell direct to consumers, the complexity is immense. Coca-Cola operates across more than 50 distinct channels, from supermarkets and convenience stores to airlines, cinemas, stadiums, and beach kiosks.

Modern media, as Arroyo defines it, brings together consumer, shopper, retailer, media, content, creator, and e-commerce data into a single environment. This includes first, second, and third-party data, geolocation, transactions, loyalty cards, and content signals from platforms and creators around the world.

“Think about a massive, big boiling pot where you put all of that together in one place,” he says. The goal is to move from broad, one-size-fits-all plans to ultra-segmented growth audiences, defined down to postcode level but executed at a global scale. For a company selling 2.3bn beverages a day across 30m outlets in 200 countries, this represents a step change in how growth is driven.

“This modern media approach starts with data at the scale and allows us to bring all of those multiple data sets in one single place for one given country. And then think about a design of growth audiences, whereby going to see that we move from one plan for any given brand to an ultra-segmented plan that really goes to those consumer groups and consumer cards and segments that matter,” he explains. “We’ll understand the drivers of consumption, the motivations, the triggers of consumption moving forward, not only from a media investment standpoint but also bringing the content, the alternatives of content, in a contextual, relevant way that will drive the conversion into transactions.”

Coca-Cola has already been pushing the boundaries of what hyper-personalized communication, at scale, looks like. Take the return of ‘Share a Coke.’ More than a decade after its original launch, it was activated across more than 10bn bottles and cans in 120 countries, featuring over 30,000 locally relevant names.

The campaign contributed to single-serve transaction growth and helped Coca-Cola Zero Sugar deliver its fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit volume growth.

“It has accelerated five times the growth of our single-serve packages. Single-serve packages are very important because that’s where most of the consumer engagement, particularly with Gen Z, happens,” he says. “It’s the highest growth in the last five years.”

Beyond sales, the data dividend is equally significant. “Just that initiative added to our database 20m first-party data points around the world,” Arroyo adds.

## On Embracing AI

Artificial intelligence underpins much of this transformation, but Arroyo is careful to frame its role clearly. “It’s very clear that AI has phenomenal, fantastic applications in the whole marketing process, end to end, from insights to creation to production to media planning to media buying to performance tracking.”

Within Coca-Cola’s marketing organisation, adoption is already widespread. Through a combination of formal training and on-the-job learning, 85% of the company’s 2,000 global marketers now regularly use ChatGPT. That figure increases when you consider various other AI tools on its roster.

“You can help our teams do way better and faster marketing if they are really able to leverage the power of human genius and human creativity and AI capability at the same time.”

For Arroyo, the emphasis is firmly on augmentation rather than replacement. “It’s about the ‘and’ as opposed to the ‘or’ and we’re only at the beginning of that journey.”

AI’s ability to surface psychological, sociological, and emotional insights at speed, for example, is reshaping how creative effectiveness is understood. But Arroyo sees an enduring role for human judgment. The quality of outcomes, Arroyo insists, still depends on the quality of human thinking, from prompting to interpretation and critical judgment.

“I don’t see a world without the human playing a significant role in crafting, in creating, in curating the output.”

Despite these assurances on the value of the human touch, Coca-Cola’s use of AI has not been without controversy, particularly around its Christmas campaign. From criticism that its use produced a clunky and inconsistent ad to more extreme calls for a boycott of the brand over its experiments with the tech, Coke has been on the sharp end of backlash. But Arroyo is dismissive of claims that the work underperformed.

“We got a 5.9 point score in System1 [for our Christmas ad], which is extremely high,” he says in defense. “And Kantar disclosed that this year it’s the second-best ad in Christmas across all categories.”

For him, the debate doesn’t make him question AI’s use in creative executions, but it does reinforce the importance of transparency, ethics, and trust. “We continue to build on our journey of learning, learning and developing our capabilities on AI.”

As one of the most influential marketers in the world, Arroyo sees part of his role as encouraging peers to embrace technology responsibly. Trust, ethics, and integrity remain non-negotiable.

“I see my role in encouraging my own peers to embrace technology, including AI, but doing that in a responsible and transparent way.”

Manolo Arroyo has been nominated for The Drum and the World Federation of Advertisers’ Global Marketer of the Year Award 2025. Find out more about the accolade and this year’s nominees.

Previous winners of the award include Asmita Dubey, chief digital and marketing officer at L’Oréal, who won for 2023, and Marcel Marcondes, global chief marketing officer at AB InBev, who won for 2024.

For most businesses, 2025 has proven to be another challenging year. The global cost of living crisis, tariffs, geopolitical turmoil and regulatory upheaval have wreaked havoc on bottom lines.

How Coca-Cola's CMO Transformed a 6,000-Agency Mess into a Digital-First Marketing Powerhouse

## The Unseen Crisis in Marketing

Marketing professionals are facing a **generational redundancy crisis**. At a time when they should be wrapping up the year and enjoying the holidays, anxiety and uncertainty are at an all-time high.

### The Stark Numbers

The Advertising Council of Australia’s 2025 Salary Survey revealed a redundancy rate of **11 per cent** in the 12 months to March 2025, compared to the usual range of 5 to 7 per cent. Major companies like Omnicom, Endeavour Group, Nine, Seven West Media, News Corp, and Menulog have all made significant cuts.

Causes include **economic pressure, AI, automation, structural change, and new operating models**. But regardless of the reason, the experience for those affected is deeply personal.

### Insights from Industry Leaders

Several marketing professionals with decades of experience share their perspectives on redundancy, offering a guiding light for the industry.

#### Satya Upadhyaya, Marketing Technology Leader

**Unpacking a Personal Experience**

Redundancy rarely arrives with warning. In the last 24 months, I’ve experienced redundancy three times, and six times in my career overall. This is the paradox of modern work: you can perform exceptionally and still find yourself without a role. Not because of failure, but because of change.

**Understanding Why Redundancy Happens**

Companies pivot strategy frequently. Market pressures force cost-cutting. Boards rethink priorities. New leaders bring new directions. Automation replaces tasks faster than organisations can communicate. Understanding these external forces helped me release the emotional burden.

**Vulnerability Versus Availability**

I found myself tired of explaining that I was “between roles.” Then a thought emerged: I am not vulnerable. I am available. That one word altered everything. Vulnerability felt like a state of loss. But availability felt expansive, open, alive with possibility.

**Lessons from 100 Conversations**

- The Australian market has 6000 to 8000 recruiters. Most are overwhelmed.
- This is not a slow market. It’s a transitional one. Companies are hiring differently: niche skills, industry specialists.
- Internal referrals and network connections will open more doors than job boards.

**What Redundancy Teaches About Leadership**

Redundancy taught me humility, empathy, and reshaped my perspective. Most of all, it taught me that leadership is defined by your ability to guide, support and uplift others, especially when you yourself are navigating uncertainty. Redundancy does not diminish you. It frees you.

#### Pip Stocks, Director, Pip Stocks Consulting

**Australia’s Marketing Sector Is Experiencing Its Largest Wave of Redundancies in Decades**

When experienced people leave, tacit knowledge disappears, organisational history is erased, pattern recognition weakens, and decision quality can decline. You can automate tasks, but you cannot automate judgment.

**The Rise of “Fractional Wisdom”**

As companies cut senior roles but still need senior brains, we can expect fractional chiefs, portfolio experts, interim leadership, advisory boards, and on-demand coach and mentor networks. Experience will become modular.

Organisations need to treat knowledge as an asset: build internal knowledge bases, use AI to codify past learnings, pair juniors with senior advisors, bring back the wise as experienced guides, and invest in teaching Gen Zs about curiosity, critical thinking and systems thinking.

A people-light organisation is not a human-light organisation. It’s one that uses AI to remove friction while elevating human judgment.

#### Dr Anna Harrison, Founder, RAMMP

**Identifying AI ‘Workslop’**

Redundancy at 40 or 50 feels brutal. But strategically? You’re not obsolete. AI can pump out 100 options. You can instantly see which two are worth betting on. That’s the difference between work and winning.

AI is ridiculously fast, generalised pattern-matching with no childhood, no context, no skin in the game. And now we have a name for that stupidity: **AI-generated workslop**.

But there is exactly one category of data your AI does not have access to: the deals you’ve watched fall over for invisible reasons, the campaign that “should” have worked but tanked, the founder meltdown you navigated. That is non-public data. That is unstructured, emotional, embodied experience.

#### Fabrizia Roberto, Fractional CMO, Founder

**I’ve Lived This Twice**

The first was during the GFC, when I was still very junior. The second time happened much later in my career. Both times, I ended up in a significantly better place. Both times, the catalyst was the same: recognising that redundancy is not a verdict on your talent; it’s a signal of misalignment.

Redundancy shakes your confidence long before it ever touches your competence.

**Experience Compounds**

You’ve seen cycles. You’ve watched technologies rise and fall. You know what creates real growth and what is simply noise. Where early-career marketers see tactics, later-career marketers see patterns. And patterns are what help businesses avoid expensive mistakes.

In this new era, with AI accelerating everything except wisdom, marketers with depth, perspective and adaptability hold an advantage that no algorithm can replicate.

#### Geoff Main, Marketing Director/Founder, Passionberry Marketing

**The Redundancy Mirage: Why Cutting Capability Is Killing the Growth You Think You’re Protecting**

We’re in a cycle of marketing redundancies that are being framed as “necessary efficiency.” But here’s the uncomfortable truth: when you cut marketing capability, you’re often cutting the very systems that are generating the revenue you’re trying to protect today. Not tomorrow. Now.

Every company has a growth loop. For example: content leads to engagement leads to sales enablement leads to pipeline velocity leads to referrals. It’s usually invisible. It rarely sits on a dashboard. But it powers everything.

When redundancies break that loop, the impact starts quickly: softer inbound, slower deal cycles, shrinking win rates, reduced mental availability, increased reliance on discounting and trade spend.

This is the redundancy mirage: you see the saving immediately; you feel the loss when it’s too late to reverse.

If cuts are unavoidable, protect the capabilities that directly support revenue now: your reach, your distinctiveness and the core parts of your growth loop. These are not marketing luxuries. They are revenue infrastructure.

And to the CMOs out there: it’s our responsibility to clearly articulate the impact embedded in both the art (systems, brand, purchasing triggers) and the science (the metrics that matter) of marketing for our C-Suite teams.

Professional are facing a generational redundancy crisis. At a time where professionals should be looking forward to wrapping up the year, taking a break and spending time with their families over the holidays, anxiety and uncertainty are at an all-time high.
 

The Advertising Council of Austral

Marketing's Redundancy Crisis: CMOs Reveal the Hidden Truth Behind Job Cuts and How to Thrive

## The Illusion of Change in Hawaii's Tourism Strategy

Despite promises of a **post-Covid reset** to prioritize Hawaiian culture and volunteering, the Hawaii Tourism Authority's (HTA) new marketing campaign, "The People. The Place. The Hawaiian Islands," feels like **business as usual**. The campaign targets **high-value travelers** from Europe—wealthy individuals seeking mindfulness, inner balance, and stress relief—but critics argue it's out of touch with the realities facing Hawaii's residents.

### Marketing to the 'Mindful' Yet Wealthy

HTA's strategy focuses on attracting visitors from the UK, Germany, and Switzerland who are willing to **stay longer and spend more**. The campaign is filled with ad agency buzzwords: finding meaning, forging sincere connections, and exploring tradition. It even includes an AI assistant called **"Your Personal Aloha"** to help plan trips centered on restoration and well-being.

![Caroline Anderson HTA](https://d1l18ops95qbzp.cloudfront.net/wp-content/2025/12/13141431/Screenshot-2025-12-13-at-2.13.52%E2%80%AFPM.png)
*Caroline Anderson, interim leader of HTA, speaks to Hawaii News Now.*

### A Disconnect from Local Realities

For those living in Hawaii, the campaign's emphasis on **serenity and mindfulness** is ironic. Residents face **unaffordability, lack of healthcare access, poor infrastructure, and climate crisis burdens**. The campaign's rhetoric about responsible tourism and preserving Hawaiian culture feels like **pro forma talk** when compared to its implementation.

For example, the AI assistant often recommends unsustainable activities like water skiing when asked for **voluntourism** or cultural experiences. A query for "Hawaiian culture" yields generic suggestions like "Learn about Hawaiian culture," while travel packages promoted through the AI include luxury escapes costing nearly **$11,000 per person**.

### The Broken Promise of a Tourism Reset

During the Covid pandemic, HTA leaders promised a **"regenerative tourism"** model to rebuild with equity and sustainability. However, as the economy recovered, political will for real change diminished. **Executive turnover** at HTA has led to shifting visions, with the current interim leader, Caroline Anderson, emphasizing attracting visitors who support local businesses and honor Hawaiian culture.

Anderson stated that the campaign aims to attract **meaningful, reflective travelers** who respect local communities, but critics argue it's still focused on **wealthy tourists** and fails to address root problems like over-tourism and resident hardships.

### What the Data Shows

Recent tourism data shows visitor levels remaining flat in 2025 compared to 2024, but spending increased by **5%**. While HTA might claim credit, rising prices in Hawaii—such as hotel rooms averaging **$360**—likely explain the boost, not effective marketing.

### The Bottom Line

HTA's strategy of **"fewer tourists, more spending"** is seen by many as PR sophistry that ignores community needs. Despite high hopes for change after Covid and the Lahaina fires, Hawaii's tourism marketing remains **out of touch and ineffective**, prioritizing profit over genuine sustainability and cultural preservation.

Despite a post-Covid reset to lean into Hawaiian culture and volunteering, those aspects of visiting the islands are sparse in new HTA materials.

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